Joshua Rosen

This movie is the worst disaster made by Taika Waititi and Disney (and that's saying something). Terrible acting followed by a half-baked, overly-forced plot that disgraced an otherwise beautiful story for the sake of making fun of American Samoans and to push a serious political agenda about trans people in sports and white people being bigoted. Painting the white coach, Thomas Rongen, as a bigoted, curmudgeonly drunk who deliberately misgenders a trans person is a very dark picture to paint of someone who never engaged in these actions. Many interviews as well as the original documentary clearly show the coach as very open and accepting who was widely loved, and approached his coaching position positively. In today's society, intentionally misgendering someone is basically considered a hate crime, so showing the coach do it in a movie "based on a true story" completely destroys the image of that coach just for the sake of pushing some political narrative. According to interviews, the coach actually went out of his way to make sure he respected his trans player's identity by asking her what name she preferred. Imagine if a movie was made about Martin Luther King Jr, but it portrayed him as a gangster in Compton shooting at cops and selling drugs just so the movie can make a conservative political point about how black men commit more crime than white men. My guess is it wouldn't be too warmly embraced. They also heavily implied American Samoan soccer players are worse than what you'd find from a U.S middle school soccer team. The actual reason they lost 31-0 had to do with their senior squad having passport issues, and so they filled the team with teenagers who were not ready for International Soccer. Every Samoan on screen is just a big idiot, except for the trans player, of course, who the movie is mainly about for some reason. The fact that Taika Waititi said he can't even remember the changes he made to the original story shows just how little he cared about actually honoring the legacy of the players and the coach, and more about stroking his own ego and pushing a political agenda. People need to stop giving him projects because he does not care about putting effort into making a good movie, and has no regard for destroying someone's reputation.

This review is up until episode 3: TLDR: Characters are all different from the books as well as many of the big scenes. I had higher hopes for this show than the movies when I saw Riordan would be involved, but have been sorely let down. While this is more true to the source material than the movies in SOME ways, it changes way too many big things about the characters, their personalities, and the big events. Why does Percy seem so frightened all the time? In the books, he's more arrogant and short tempered. Chiron is basically an NPC the way he reads his lines. Annabeth doesn't sound anything like what she's like in the books. Grover is horrendous in every way. He's so far from the Grover in the books, it's laughable. The Medusa scene is completely wrong and makes no sense. Even the way they killed her is different and makes no sense. How was that small baseball cap fitted for a normal-sized head fit on Medusa's head with a hundred snakes? And while she's invisible, Percy perfectly chops off Medusa's head? In the books, Percy cuts her head off while using a mirror to look at her. I'll see if episode 4 is any better, but if this continues to just betray the source material, I will stop watching. Shame on you, Riordan.