I am a huge fan of the original Clash of the Titans and I am a huge fan of Greek Mythology. I may be a huge fan of Greek Mythology because of the original Clash of the Titans. When I saw this new one was going to come out I was excited because if ever there was a movie that could be made more badass by a remake it was that one. When people disparaged it because they felt that it didn’t need to be remade and that to do so was an outright affront to Ray Harryhausen I defended it. I liked the effects in the original for all their cheesy, herky jerky goodness but there are better effects now and I was excited to see what Louis Leterrier could do with the Kraken and Medusa after a pretty decent job on the Incredible Hulk. Every time some 12 year old declared that Clash was a rip off of the God of War video game series I would scoff and remind them that the world of film, and indeed oral story-telling, existed before 2005. I defended Sam Worthington’s casting and even defended, albeit halfheartedly, the inclusion of 3-D. I did so much defending that when it came time to see the movie I was excited just so I could stop defending the ensuing awesomeness. I was betrayed.

I am very sad to report that the new Clash of the Titans is an almost complete failure. There is a good movie in there somewhere but sadly that movie was released 29 years ago. Now I know it probably sounds as if I am just a Harry Hamlin fanboy who would never accept anything else but that is not the case at all. There are very definite reasons this movie was terrible and, just like the script, they barely have anything to do with the original movie.

First of all, the 3D was completely useless and is the best argument currently available against retro-fitting films with the technology. It looked fuzzy and muddled and added absolutely nothing to the proceedings but a headache. One of the major reasons for this is that the action is mostly shot in really quick cuts that are very difficult to focus on in 3-D. Having a third dimension doesn’t work when you can’t focus on anything at all. The only time increased depth of field was present was when people were standing around talking and in those cases it was generally dim and fuzzy because of the glasses and the poor effects. In something like Avatar, I never had a hard time focusing on anything and I felt like I was right there in the middle of the action because it was shot with 3-D in mind and done using the proper technology. Also James Cameron knew what he was doing. In Clash of the Titans rather than being in the midst of the action I felt like I was watching it through a 15 year old View-Master with the lenses caked in mud. I haven’t seen the movie in 2-D but I suspect that the action looks better at the very least. I haven’t heard from anyone who saw it in 3-D say it looked good.

The bad 3-D was annoying but it wasn’t enough to ruin the experience so the writing had to step up and seal the deal. The story was a complete and total mess. It was just really, really bad. The original had a pretty simple story that, while it wasn’t exactly like the source material, was still a pretty decent adaptation. Cassiopeia boasts that Andromeda is hotter than gods, Hera decides that is bullshit and makes the city of Joppa sacrifice Andromeda to the Kraken or the whole place will get destroyed. Perseus, son of Zeus, has to step in and save her by defeating the Kraken. Sure there are other details but those are the broad strokes. Pretty simple and pretty effective. And all that is in the remake as well. Sadly, in an effort to update the story for modern audiences, ostensibly by including trite bullshit, the writers have decided to overlay the original plot with a bunch of nonsense about humans rebelling against the gods and Perseus wanting to do things as a man.

So to take this apart a bit, I would be fine with the whole ‘raging against the gods’ business if they had bothered to take time to set it up a bit. As it was, we see Zeus sneaking into Danae’s chambers to get with her as a slight against her husband King Acrisius. She then gets pregnant and Acrisius tosses her out to sea with the child in a wooden coffin. In doing so he is cursed and turned into Calibos, a much less creepy looking man-monster than what we had in the original but at least scenes of him walking won’t induce any epileptic seizures this time. So a fisherman finds the coffin with Danae dead and the boy alive. They name him Perseus and he becomes a fisherman himself. The narrative jumps forward to Perseus as an adult and he and his father are pulling up the nets. I don’t know if it is standard for Greek fishermen to have their daughters and wives just hanging out on a fishing boat but there they were. Apparently they had never seen Deadliest Catch. Anyway, the nets are empty and Perseus’s dad starts ranting about how they haven’t caught anything in like three days and how the gods suck and someday someone is going to have to take a stand against their apparent fish hoarding tyranny. So just then they look up and see a bunch of guys knocking a statue of Zeus off a cliff at the edge of the sea which prompts Perseus’s dad to say they shouldn’t be doing that…apparently when he said someone should take a stand he meant someone else later on in the movie…like Perseus I guess.   Hades, the lord of the Underworld, then shows up and smites them all for disrespecting Zeus. This is apparently phase one of him convincing Zeus to turn him loose on humans to make them pray again. Hades notices the little fishing boat and destroys that too. Perseus is the only survivor because he is part god. Oddly, he is not part of the god who can breathe under water but whatever.

Perseus is taken to Argos and wanders into the palace just in time to hear an enormously breasted Cassiopeia boast about how hot her daughter is and Hades shows up to teach them some respect. He kills all the guards in the palace except for Perseus, who charges but is rebuffed, and issues the ultimatum about the whole Kraken sacrifice thing. See in this version, the Kraken is a sea monster made from a bit of Hades to smite people. Which makes total sense given that there isn’t a god of the ocean or anything that would preside over sea monsters…oh wait.  Before Hades bounces he off-handedly mentions that Perseus is Zeus’s son but does so in the most ambiguous way possible. The remaining guards who were apparently playing dice in the break room while all this was happening then set upon Perseus and start torturing him asking if he is part god or not. Perseus, like many adopted kids, has no idea who his biological parents were but finds the idea repulsive because Hades killed his dad. Eventually some random demi-god Io wanders in and convinces everyone that Perseus should be allowed to go out and save Andromeda since he is half-god.

Meanwhile, in Olympus, Hades tells Zeus that one of his many bastard children is running around Argos and can really screw up their plans. Zeus basically cuts Perseus loose since he’s never prayed to him before. Hades tells Calibos that they need his help killing the son his wife had with the highest of gods. Because, you know, she is such a whore for having sex with a dude that looked EXACTLY like him. Anyway, Calibos agrees and goes after Perseus. And that, in all of its nonsensical glory is the SET UP of this movie. It continues to become more convoluted as people do things for no good reason, characters are introduced to fill up a hole in the standard action movie character list and are then quickly forgotten and Perseus acts like an arrogant little brat who gets his ass kicked with a consistency that could be used to set time in Greenwich.

The script never takes the time to really establish why everyone is so pissed at the gods outside of some vague mention of arrogance and Zeus being too nice. Apparently sneaking in to your wife’s bedroom and knocking her up and then turning you into a monster for your trouble passes for nice in ancient Greece. The bit with Perseus’s family is even less fleshed out. His dad is pissed because they haven’t caught anything in a few days? Talk about gross buck passing entitlement. It makes sense that Perseus is a whiny bitch for the rest of the movie given that is the example pops set for him but come on, that is thin. Maybe his dad was just a really bad fisherman. And sure, he is pissed at Hades for killing them but in all fairness his dad was screaming about how big of douches the gods were and that there should be an uprising. Hell, even with the First Amendment we can’t say that we are going to take violent action against the President without the secret service letting our asses know its shoe size so why did he think he could shout about the GODS?

And Perseus has absolutely no consistency about what gods he is pissed at. The only reason he agrees to help Andromeda is so he can take a crack at the Kraken and leave Hades weak enough to kill, which in this case apparently means ‘send back to the realm over which he presides.’ So okay, revenge against the god that killed your family, that makes sense but then he rages against all the gods and keeps going on about how he wants to do this as a man. This brings us to the next bit of absolute hornswaggle.

Okay so the only reason that Perseus is still alive is because he is a demi-god. If he weren’t then he would have drowned too.  So right off the bat he isn’t doing anything as just a man. When Le Chiffre from Casino Royale asks him if he has ever used a sword before, Perseus says he has never had to, which is surprising due to the whiny bitch thing. So we get the training moment where Perseus gets put on his ass at first and then turns into the goddamn Zatoichi with the sword and Draco tells him ‘oh there is a god in you after all.’ This is a convenient bit of hand waving to explain how Perseus can learn to fight all of a sudden without resorting to a montage. And besides, they only have 10 days before Andromeda is Kraken food. Sadly, this contrivance is betrayed by the script in just about every fight that follows as Perseus spends most of the battles on his ass while other people fight giant scorpions and Calibos and that is it because there isn’t much action in this movie at all.

Zeus, seeing that Perseus is a raging wuss, bestows some gifts on him. A magic sword like the Sword of Thundera mixed with a light saber and Pegasus the winged horse. Perseus refuses to use these things, however, because he wants to do this as a man. It is pointed out that his pride is getting everyone killed, which may have been lampshade hanging but the justification he gives for it is complete crap. I am not sure who thought this nonsense plot point was a good idea but to use it here is ridiculous. There is probably a story to be told about a demi-god who just wants to succeed as a human but Perseus is not the hero to do it with. As a character, he is the Inspector Gadget of Greek Mythology. All he did was use magic stuff. In the original myth he had winged sandals for flying (Pegasus was created by blood from Medusa’s severed head hitting the ground and was tamed by Bellerophon),  a magic sword, a polished mirror-like shield, a magic purse to carry Medusa’s head and a helmet of invisibility. These came from Athena,Hermes  and some nymphs as opposed to Zeus, who couldn’t even be bothered to send child support. Then after killing Medusa he had her head which would turn fools into stone. So yeah, there was no ‘doing things as a man’ involved with Perseus. In the myth, for his trouble he got to marry Andromeda and found Mycenae so it worked out pretty well for him.  So it is really ridiculous to make a character like this all caught up with doing things as a man which apparently involves falling down and failure.

There is really no lesson learned here or any real character arc to be had. Perseus never stops spouting the ‘as a man’ business even after riding around on a flying horse. That is not a spoiler, it is in the trailer and the original.  This is like a woman who has worked as an escort for 20 years saying she is a virgin because she didn’t really mean it. His justification for nerfing himself is never validated and a whole bunch of people die on principle and in this case that principle makes no sense. As far as heroes go, this Perseus could use some work.

The film is not without some silly charms. It is kind of fun to watch Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes chew the scenery so much that you expect that at any minute they will run out of set and plummet from Olympus to the earth. The Medusa scene was pretty badass and I still like Sam Worthington even though his character sucked. But those few compliments do absolutely nothing to erase the sting of the horrible writing and fuzzy, worthless 3-D.

I am not sure why it is so hard to do good movies about Greek Mythology. By and large, the stories are awesome on their own. There is a good reason why they have endured for so many centuries. They really don’t need Hollywood coming in and messing it all up. This should have been an awesome movie. I feel robbed of the great movie that could have been. Even still, it didn’t need to stick to the mythology 100%, the original didn’t. It didn’t need to do exactly what the original did either. It just needed not to suck. This movie is just like its hero, it just fell down and failed.

3.5 out of 10