by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I spent much of
last night watching Wrath of the Titans, the 2012 sequel to the 2010 remake of the 1981 Clash of the Titans, which didn’t do as well at the box office (in
fact it was so poorly received the producers abandoned plans for a third film
in the cycle, Revenge of the Titans) but turned out to be a better movie, largely because there was less
pachydermous exposition between the action highlights and also because the
script seemed better constructed this time around. Also, unlike the 2010 Clash
of the Titans, Wrath of the Titans actually contains some Titans in the dramatis
personae. You’ll recall that in
ancient Greek mythology the Titans were the ancestors of the gods, and there
was another round of supernatural beings who were the Titans’ ancestors, led by
Uranus, whose son Cronos led a revolt of the Titans in which they killed Uranus
and the other members of the generation before him, only Cronos was himself
killed (and, in some versions of the tale, actually eaten) by his son Zeus
(Liam Neeson) as leader of a rebellion of the gods against the Titans. In Wrath
of the Titans Zeus’s scapegrace brother
Hades (Ralph Fiennes) makes common cause with Zeus’s son Ares, god of war
(Edgar Ramirez), to kidnap Zeus and hook him up to some sort of device made of
rocks that will drain Zeus of his godly powers and transform then back into
Cronos (who isn’t played by an actor but is a digital creation of fire and
molten rock), who once he regains control of the universe will destroy all
Earth once and for all. To keep this from happening the remaining gods are
depending on Perseus (Sam Worthington, this time with tousled, curly hair more
resembling the traditional image of an ancient Greek hero — or a modern Greek
male, for that matter — than the severe U.S. Marine-style cut he wore in
the earlier film), who’s retired from the hero business and returned to the
trade of his foster-father, fishing.
Perseus and his wife Io had a son, Helius
(John Bell), before Io died (the actress who’d played her in Clash of the
Titans, Gemma Arterton, was busy
with another film, so writers Greg Berlanti, David Leslie Johnson and Dan
Mazeau just killed her off and showed her grave; remember that in the original
Greek myths Io was eight generations older than Perseus!), and he’s depicted as
the usual useless hanger-on, though at least he’s less oppressively cute than
most of the generations of movie kids we’ve had to endure since Shirley Temple
became a superstar in the 1930’s). Perseus sets off along with Andromeda
(Rosamund Pike, replacing Alexa Davalos in the first film — which meant
Andromeda’s hair color changes from black then to blonde here), the princess of
Argos he abandoned in a Lone Ranger-ish moment at the end of the first film
(even though the director of that one, Louis Leterrier, wanted them to get
together as per the original myths and the 1981 movie), and Agenor (Toby
Kebbell), son of the sea god Poseidon and therefore Perseus’ cousin (Perseus,
you’ll recall, is the son of Zeus by one of his innumerable dalliances with
mortal women). They have to descend into the underworld and find their way
through a labyrinth designed by Hephaestus (Bill Nighy, oddly made up and
costumed to look like a rabbi) — it’s not clear whether he’s a Titan or a god
but he made the gods’ super-weapons: Poseidon’s trident, Hades’ pitchfork and
Zeus’s thunderbolt. Hephaestus gets locked out of his own labyrinth when the
trick door on the side of the mountain that’s its entrance closes on him too
soon, but Perseus and Agenor end up making their way through the labyrinth —
though Perseus has to stop and slay a Minotaur (well, what else do you expect to find in the middle of an ancient
Greek labyrinth?) along the way — to reach the underworld city of Tantalus,
where Hades is holding Zeus captive and he and Ares are draining his power to
revivify Cronos. There’s a sudden cutaway between the antics of Perseus and his
commando squad underground and the army of Andromeda — some of whom are wearing
all-over armored helmets that make them look like the Teutonic Knights in
Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky — going forth to fight what look like half-alive, half-dead minions
summoned up by Hades, and the action between the two fronts is so badly
integrated by director Jonathan Liebesman that at first I wondered, when I saw
the army massed for an outdoor battle just after we’d been watching Perseus and
his squad underground, “Who the hell are they?”
It ends with Perseus and Andromeda winning their
battles and finally getting
together as they should have at the end of the first film, but Zeus, Poseidon
and Cronos all turn into stone statues and crumble (why? When the Kraken turned
into a statue and crumbled at the end of the first film, at least there was an
explanation — Perseus had shown him Medusa’s severed head, which he kept in a
bag and trotted out as needed to stop his enemies, since Medusa’s head had the
same effect after she died that it had had when she was alive: it turned to
stone anyone who looked at it — but in this movie it just happens), and the last shot is of Perseus and Andromeda in
a lip-lock as she talks about the next military campaign she’s going to embark
on (no doubt that was going to figure in the plot of the third film if it had
been made) while all he has on his mind is sex and he couldn’t be less interested in future battles at the moment. Like
the 2010 Clash of the Titans, Wrath of the Titans might have been an even deeper and richer films if
the deleted scenes included as bonus items on the DVD had been in the film;
they include a sequence of Perseus recruiting his commandos from Andromeda’s
army (and scaring some off by saying it’s likely to be a suicide mission) that
would have better integrated the two plot lines that converge in the climax,
and also the gods would have been more genuine figures of pathos had some of
these outtakes been included. Overall, though, Wrath of the Titans — which carried over some of the actors from the
2010 Clash of the Titans but
surprisingly few of the behind-the-camera personnel (the director was different
and so were all the writers) — is a quite entertaining action-adventure movie
in the modern manner and well worth seeing.
