by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I stayed in and
once we had dinner I ran us a movie I had just got on amazon.com, part of a
four-DVD set of action films featuring Liam Neeson — who joked on 60 Minutes that in his 50’s he suddenly became an action star
with the success of his film Taken, in which he plays an avenging father tracing the human traffickers who
have kidnapped his daughter. The film was Clash of the Titans, a 2010 remake of the 1981 movie that was
stop-motion animation genius Ray Harryhausen’s last project. I’d seen the
original 1981 Clash of the Titans fairly recently and regarded it as silly but with a certain charm —
and, of course, dazzling when Harryhausen’s stop-motion creations were front
and center on screen. The new one was directed by Louis Leterrier two years
after he’d achieved big action-movie bankability with the 2008 version of The
Incredible Hulk, and was clearly an
attempt to duplicate the success of James Cameron’s Avatar a year earlier: not only was it released in 3-D
(though only in a post-production conversion which Leterrier hated so much he
turned down the job of directing the sequel, Wrath of the Titans, in 2012), it had the same male star as Avatar, Sam Worthington. The 2010 Clash of the Titans was, like its predecessor, a mash-up of (mostly)
Greco-Roman myths dealing with Perseus (Sam Worthington), who’s raised as a
foundling by a family of fishermen even though he’s really the son of Zeus (Liam
Neeson), king of the gods. The original screenwriter, Beverley Cross, put a
camp spin on the material, but the writing committee on this version, Travis
Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, took it way too seriously and ended up with a movie that was mostly
just dull.
According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the original plan was for
Perseus to have his hair long at the start of his quest to save the people of
Argos from the wrath of the gods in general and Hades (Ralph Fiennes, reunited
with Neeson from the cast of Schindler’s List), ruler of the underworld, in particular, but he
would cut it later. Then they decided to keep Worthington’s hair the same
length throughout the movie and to cut it really short, which makes him look like a modern-day U.S.
Marine who’s beamed in to the world of Greek mythology. The film basically
follows the outline of the original — and of the Greek myths in which the story
originated: Perseus reluctantly goes on a quest to kill Medusa (Natalia
Vodianova, though in this version instead of a woman with snakes growing out of
her head instead of hair, she’s a creature with a snake-haired human head
grafted onto a snake’s body), even though one look at her will turn a man to
stone (a fate that befalls the four very interesting characters Perseus goes on
the quest with — and whom it’s a pity to lose so early and so arbitrarily). In
the original myth and the 1981 film, Perseus lines the back of his shield with
mirrors so he can kill Medusa by watching her reflection, which is safe, instead of facing her directly; in
this one he only accidentally discovers that he can kill her by looking at her reflection. Then a
vengeful Zeus decides to punish the people of Argos for bringing down his
statue by sending them the Kraken, an unimaginably huge monster from the sea (a
Nordic rather than a Greek myth, actually, though Greek mythology had a similar
being called “Cetus”) — only Perseus defeats the Kraken by using Medusa’s head
to turn it to stone and causing it to
shatter and collapse into the sea.
Clash of the Titans, the 2010 version, has neither the cheesy camp
appeal of the original (there’s only a cameo appearance by “Bebo,” the flying
mechanical owl who figured prominently in the 1981 original — obviously the
filmmakers were trying to come up with a “cute” sidekick character à la R2-D2 in the original Star Wars) nor the depth it could have had as the gods, like
their counterparts in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, worry about losing their immortality and their
hold on the world. The writers of the 2010 Clash of the Titans invented the conceit that the gods can live
forever only if ordinary humans believe in them and supply them eternal life
through the power of their prayers — which the writers obviously hoped would be
intense and moving but sounded to me too much like the ending of the film Elf, in which Santa Claus’s sleigh has trouble getting
off the ground because too few people believe in Santa Claus anymore to supply
the necessary “Christmas spirit.” Zeus’s brother Hades is seething with
bitterness at Zeus’s banishment of him to the underworld following the gods’
successful revolt against their ancestors, the Titans (oddly, despite the
title, no Titans appear as dramatis personae in the film!), and he said instilling fear in the
people will work just as well at keeping the gods alive forever as instilling
love. (At times they sound like Barack Obama arguing with Donald Trump.) Oddly,
I watched some of the “deleted scenes” on the DVD and for once thought the film
would have been deeper and richer if they had been left in: the outtakes
included much longer versions of the conflicts on Olympus and elevated the
other god characters to more importance — Charles said that with the outtakes
included this would be as much a film about Apollo (Luke Evans) as about
Perseus; as it is, just about all Apollo gets to do in the final cut is stand
around while Zeus and Hades argue and look hot (in both senses) in his gold
lamé costume that’s supposed to represent “solaricity.” The film scores with
stunning computer-generated special effects, but somehow they don’t have the
rustic charm of Harryhausen’s animated models in the original, and likewise,
though Sam Worthington is better as a “type” than Harry Hamlin as Perseus, the
sheer dorkiness with which Hamlin handled being so wretchedly miscast as an
ancient Greek hero had its own appeal which Worthington’s grim, almost
Eastwood-esque performance misses.
Clash of the Titans is one of those movies which Hollywood would
probably have been much better advised to leave alone — and it also suffers
from an inexplicable change, forced on Louis Leterrier by the studio, in which
instead of pairing up with Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), princess of Argos, at the
end — as he did in the original legends and the 1981 film — Perseus takes a
Lone Ranger-ish farewell to Andromeda and Argos at the end and instead ends up
with Io (Gemma Artherton), his mentor from the gods, even though, as an
imdb.com “Trivia” contributor pointed out, in the original myths “Io is
Perseus’ great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, and an old
flame of his father Zeus.” (This became even sillier when the filmmakers were
preparing the sequel and Gemma Artherton was unavailable to repeat the role
because she was making another movie, so they killed off Io and brought in a
different actress, Rosamund Pike, as Andromeda.) One odd aspect of the 2010 Clash
of the Titans is that the writers
“tweaked” the story in the direction of Judeo-Christian as well as Greek myths:
Zeus is depicted along the lines of the nastier aspects of the Old Testament
God, angrily sending out various menaces to attack humanity because he doesn’t
think people love him enough; the baby Perseus floats into the action inside a
coffin with his dead mother (like Moses being discovered in the bulrushes); and
the human couple who end up raising him come off as quite Joseph-and-Mary-like,
while his (step)father’s profession as a fisherman can’t help but recall Saint
Peter. The 2010 Clash of the Titans was also one of those modern-day movies that followed the maddening
habit of having no opening credits — not even
the title of the film — but relegating everything to the end. I miss opening credits even more than
I miss the “The End” title that regularly used to adorn movies at their finish
— when Alfred Hitchcock omitted an end title at the end of The Birds it was considered quite shocking, as if he were
saying that the bird attacks would continue and the story would never really
end; now it’s just become routine.
