|
 It’s
not my adoration of filmmaker and master animator Ray Harryhausen that
tilts my viewpoint of this new version of his Clash of the Titans. I
was surprisingly curious to see a possible improvement over what was
never the most sterling of Harryhausen’s ancient world fantasy
offerings. The original 1981 film doesn’t have a patch on Jason and the
Argonauts {1963}, or even the lesser Golden Voyage of Sinbad {1974},
so what could it hurt to give fresh eyes a try? Well, that’s what I get
for having hope. I should have known better. Without the innate
charisma of Harryhausen’s magical stop-motion monsters, ninety percent
of this story’s charm is gone and left in its wake is this lumbering,
leaden misfire so lacking in wit, art and spectacle that it makes the
original film sublime by comparison.
In the
long ago metropolis of Argos, a jealous man is driven to a desperate
act. Hurling a coffin from a high cliff, he rids himself of the spawn
of his beguiled wife and Zeus, the king of the gods in disguise. Perseus,
the unwanted infant, will have the luck of the heavens on his side as
his casket is discovered by a loving family, and from these unlikely
beginnings will he discover that his fate is sealed by the deities. Or
is it? As Perseus’ divine paternity comes to light, the more determined
he is to buck against it. The pantheon on Mount Olympus has brought him
nothing but grief from his conception to the tragedies in his young
adulthood. His losses set him on a quest to save the life of a princess
whose parents were dumb enough to insult the gods, placing the young
woman and possibly all of humanity in peril.
Charmless and utterly lackluster, there’s not one jaw-dropping moment in
the whole of Clash of the Titans. This remake concentrates much effort
on making the audience sympathise more deeply with our hero, Perseus,
but with its awful script and hollow action, a Clash of the Titans video
game would have been far more involving than this tripe. The film is so
simplistic in its writing and set pieces that only the youngest of
viewers will be captivated. With dialog full of predictable empty
clichés and painfully bad attempts at humour, groans and unintended
laughter permeated the screening I attended. Often throughout the film,
actors deliver their lines and then pose as if waiting for a reaction or
trying to look heroic. It also quickly becomes an uncleverly veiled,
droning atheist tract with those who believe in the gods painted (literally)
as the ignorant bad guys and Perseus’ endless whining (Sam
Worthington reminding us of a younger Mel Gibson’s intent snarl)
about how he will face his quest as a man, not the half-god son of Zeus
that he is, only reluctantly taking up Olympian assistance when all else
fails. Cue eye roll.
For
all its alleged special effects advances over Harryhausen’s claymation,
Clash of the Titans’ creatures are terribly unimpressive. The CGI is
not only lacking in creativity, but looks oddly outdated with a strange
green screen disconnect between the pixel-born beasts and their human
prey. The action is loud and noisy, yet never thrilling and its
insistent, shallow bombast put me in the mind of a Michael Bay attempt
at Greek mythology. As with one of Bay’s epics, but mostly due to its
own incongruous special effects, at no point do you ever truly feel the
heroes’ lives are in danger. This is a movie that would’ve been far
better served in 2D; the CGI simply does not bear up under close
inspection, nor is there any point when the 3D is necessary. The
audience doesn’t even get a full gander at the anticipated undersea
Titan, the Kraken, during the movie’s climactic showdown; there are lots
of tentacles and close-ups of its Cloverfield-looking face, but not one
clear shot of the thing. We don’t get much of a display by the gods,
either; most of the scenes on Mount Olympus are focused on Zeus and
Hades, but when you do see them way in the background, all the goddesses
are played by fashion models. In a whimpering attempt at giving us a
strong female heroine, we have Io, a demigod who protects Perseus.
While I could swear in the tales of Greek mythology that I ever read, Io
was a cow, but here she’s a kicky wench whose dignified togas (-
clearly made of ancient tissue paper) get ripped into sexy action
hero girl fashions. Furthermore, in an unnecessarily fanboy-friendly
twist, the Gorgon Medusa is yet another model sexified to look like
something out of the God of War video game rather than a creature so
ugly her victims turn to stone at a glance. Would that the ladies in
the audience had been so favourably considered. Clash of the Titans is
singular in its ugliness. This is some of the worst production design
ever seen in a would-be spectacle; from its drab and glum-looking
locations to the ridiculous matted, ratty-looking wigs and facial
merkins sloppily glued to the faces of the few deities featured. Zeus
has nappy dreads in his beard and Hades’ red-rimmed toker eyes and long,
parted-in-the-middle locks would look more apropos on a hippy lost at a
Battlefield Earth convention. The only visual that could truly be
called stunning are the frequent upskirt shots of Sam Worthington’s
leather mini, but even that formidable sight isn’t enough to save this
mess. The film is poor right down to its awful score, which is as
cheesy and uninspired as the picture it inhabits. And as if intended to
bury itself even further, this movie hit bottom with me about a third of
the way in with their backhanded diss of original Clash of the Titans’
star, Bubo the mechanical owl. Belittle Bubo, puny mortal filmmakers,
and feel the fury of the mighty Gorgon Diva.
Not
for a moment an improvement over the original film and judged on its own
merits, it’s just plain bad. I really expected more from Louis
Letterier, who directed 2008’s The Incredible Hulk much more
successfully than this unfortunate rehash. Wait for the inevitable
video game tie-in; it’s bound to be much more entertaining than this.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
April
2nd, 2010
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