I can’t remember the last movie I went to see in the theater with expectations as low as those I had for Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans. It’s not even that I had fond memories of the apparently cheesy-but-fun-if-you-were-a-kid-at-the-time original and its Ray Harryhausen special effects (so if you were dreading my impersonation of Harry Knowles explaining how this raped the unforgettable afternoon he spent in the theater with Father Geek, don’t sweat it). When all I had to go by were the trailers and commercials, I was actually pretty excited. Lord of the Rings meets 300? Sure, I’ll eat it.
Then I got wind of the hideous 3D transfer, and the supposedly turgid and stupid movie underneath, and nearly got spooked off. But I’ve got a buddy I wanted to see who likes seeing big dumb shit on the big screen even more than I do, so off I went. By this point, my theory, and my solace, was that having eschewed the bogus 3D version and with expectations resting somewhere in the underworld, I might actually enjoy the thing. Relatively speaking.
And I suppose…I did? I mean, I didn’t wanna walk out or anything. I don’t even think I got bored. But I want to assure you that if you’ve ever seen a fantastical genre action movie, and I mean ever, there is no need for you to see Clash of the Titans. You’ve seen it allllllllll before, over and over.
Indeed, Clash is counting on you having done so. It relies on a kind of popcorn-movie shorthand to convey key plot elements, attach you to its characters, intimidate you at its low points and rally you at its high points. It’s so ersatz it’s almost mind bloggling. Aside from the fond memories you have of the Fellowship of the Ring or the Colonial Marines or whoever the hell else, there is no reason for you to care about any of the film’s anonymous, uninteresting…I wanna say “characters” here but I have to put it in sneer quotes. Nothing that the green young rookie warriors or the grizzled old veterans or the crazy ethnic tagalongs do or say rises above stock poses and cliches you’ve seen and heard a million times before. The casting department scored a bit with some guy named Draco or Drago or something to that effect simply because he’s played by an older, whiter, more unintelligble doppelganger of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but beyond that? Ciphers to a man. And I’m including Sam Worthington, who in the course of his three SFF tentpole films has established himself as the most bizarrely uncharismatic action superstar since–hey, I’m drawing a blank, so maybe he takes the taco! Gemma Arterton distinguishes herself as Io by being extraordinarily attractive, something that (say) Old Veteran Who Makes Quips In The Face Of Danger doesn’t have going for him, but that’s some faint praise right there.
Now, I’ll say this for Clash: Almost anything creature-related is surprisingly well done. Given how overly fluid, artificial, and biologically unconvincing CGI creatures can look–cf. Avatar–it takes some real doing to, say, light giant marauding scorpions so that the desert haze is properly reflected off their carapaces, or convincingly depict the way the heft of a giant snake-woman’s tail drags her dying body off a ledge. I was impressed that Clash pulled it off and found myself looking forward to each, well, clash. True, Medusa herself was kind of unimaginative and the Hades bat-demon things were never on screen long enough to get a good look at, but the witches and Djinns or whatever they were were delightfully creepy and gross, grand nightmare fodder for little kids. I even preferred the eye-in-hand witch things to the Pan’s Labyrinth critter they ripped the look off from.
But it was pretty much all one step forward, two steps back. For each rock-solid monster there was an embarrassingly obvious greenscreen shot–is it really that hard to make people standing around on a moving ship or animal blend in with the background? The battle sequences were generally well put together, a series of intelligible beats that made use of the space in which they took place and had physical consequences that could be readily understood–again, contrast with Avatar. But within those sequences, individual one-on-one fights were a hastily crosscut blur a la Batman Begins. As my friend put it, it was like they didn’t bother to choreograph, they just shot a bunch of people swinging swords in different directions and put it together in post. This works fine when you’re Peter Jackson and Weta and you’ve run out of time to do the warg sequence in The Two Towers, so you wing it, and even though it’s the least meticulously constructed fight in the whole trilogy, it thereby stands out as a quick, nasty, down-and-dirty tussle. This doesn’t work at all if it’s your whole movie, and you’ve really only got a total of three battles to work with. And seriously–three monsters, one of which was basically just the Cave Troll grown to Godzilla size and slapped with some Watcher-in-the-Water tentacles and Cloverfield appendages? I’m glad they kept the movie short by the increasingly overblown standards of today’s self-important popcorn flicks, but with so little actually happening, it didn’t feel like much of an adventure.
If you’ve read my blog for a long time, you know I always say that plot holes can be forgiven if the stuff that surrounds those plot holes is compelling enough. But a few impressively done scorpions does not a movie make, and thus I just sat there shaking my head at the whoppers in this thing. How did the people of Argos find out Perseus was a demigod? Why does Zeus agree to punish humanity for its hubris (a word never used!) but then constantly attempt to help Perseus stop the plot he himself set in motion? Isn’t the hilarious religious zealot figure, who looks like he came straight from an Oberline hackey-sack circle, completely reasonable in his desire to sacrifice one person in lieu of the tens of thousands who would die if the gods carry out their threat to wipe out Argos–to say nothing of the dozen who actually do die on Perseus’s absurd quest, or the hundreds who actually do die when the Kraken attacks, or even the dozens who die after Perseus defeats the Kraken by turning it to a stone statue so fragile that it collapses, raining concrete death upon the citizens he supposedly just saved? Why should we care about Perseus rescuing a character we’ve barely met and have no reason to care about any more than all the cannon fodder who’ve been sacrificed while the important people work out their daddy issues? Are we supposed to cheer for the return of those two ethnic hunter guys whose names we don’t even know and who participated in a grand total of one battle? Why didn’t the Argossians just, you know, leave Argos before the clearly articulated deadline for destruction arrived? Why cast a real actor as Poseidon only to give him one line and–this part I stress–not even make him the person who releases the Kraken? Was I the only person who got the giggles when watching Liam Neeson as Zeus argue with Ralph Fiennes as Hades because they were both in Schindler’s List?
Look, I care about action and violence and monsters onscreen as much as pretty much anyone I know. I’m always happy to see cool stuff like the scorpions or the Kraken or whatever, they go into the old fantasy memory bank to be drawn from at a later date. I got my money’s worth in that regard. But I could have walked over to the office copy machine and photocopied the cover of The Return of the King, put the page back in the paper tray, then photocopied the cover of 300 on top of that and called it a day.
I can’t tell from your review whether or not you’ve actually seen the original . . . one thing I’ve noticed in a lot of reviews is how they dismiss the original as “cheesy” or “dated” without so much as a second thought. This is dreadful because I think the original is one of the best fantasy movies ever put on film – bar none, no qualifications. Maybe it’s the cranky old man talking, but I have yet to see CGI that conveys anything resembling the real weight and density conveyed by stop-motion models.
The important thing, though, is that it’s not just a nice looking film, but a good film in general. It hews fairly close to the myths (mostly), and that means that it’s really creepy in parts, intense in others. The subterranean Medusa hunt is still one of the most suspenseful slow-burn tension moments I can ever remember seeing, and definitely an inspiration for many similar scenes in the ensuing years (including more than a few Cameron sequences). It sounds as if some of the dopier elements you’re responding to in the remake (haven’t seen it) are slightly dumbed-down from the original, in ways that undercut the point / garble the plot. (Although, yes, Zeus releases the Kraken in the original, too, but at least it’s justified by the fact that Laurence Olivier’s Zeus really does seem like someone who could demolish the world just because he got off on the wrong side of the bed that morning.)
I have not seen the original, no. That’s why I said “apparently cheesy but fun if you were a kid at the time”–I can’t speak from experience on that. Based on most of what I’ve seen people say who DID see it, that’s where I got the cheesy-but-fun thing–they all seem to say that Harryhausen’s effects are really the only good thing about it.