Oh. My. Gods. (Clash of the Titans, 2010 Review)

In case it hasn't yet become painfully obvious on this blog, I really like stories dealing with Greek mythology. Ever since we studied them in 5th grade, and I had to dress up as Hermes (so I made little wings for my sandals, tied a bedsheet around me, and brought my awesome White Power Ranger Staff weapon to school as my "caduceus"), I've just been hooked. As I've said before, I would have practically majored in mythology if I could have.

Let's begin with the briefest mythological lesson I can manage.

Hesiod was the first to actually record a form of creation myth involving our Olympian friends. According to him, there was Chaos, from whom came Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros, who caused couplings to happen. Eventually, Gaia popped out Ouranos (or Uranus) and had many children with him: the twelve Titans, and also the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires (or the "Hundred-Handers"). Kronos (or Chronus) was the youngest Titan. Long story short, the Titans rose up against their oppressive father Ouranos and took control. Kronos mated with his sister Rhea, and together they produced half of the Olympian gods: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Kronos knew that his children may rise against him as he did his own father, so he ate them all, but Rhea hid Zeus away until he was old enough to fight back. A huge war ensued, but with the help of the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires, the Olympians beat the Titans. Kronos was cut up into little tiny pieces and thrown into Tartarus (since he can't technically die). Zeus then split power between he and his two brothers: he claimed the sky, Poseidon claimed the sea and earth, and Hades claimed the underworld. The creation of man mythos changes depending on the source: sometimes Zeus made them, sometimes "the gods", and sometimes Prometheus, the son of a Titan who allied with the Olympians (and who famously gave humans fire, for which he was punished in Prometheus Bound by having a bird fly by and eat his liver everyday).

Now, take all of that information... and throw it away. Watch Clash of the Titans (1981) with the sound off. Write a screenplay, and voila! You have a new Clash of the Titans epic to end all epics.

As Professor Goodtime says, "Barf sandwich".

For the sake of time, I'm not going to go into how either movie deviates from the general myth of Perseus and Argos. There just isn't enough time, and I'm fairly convinced that the makers of the new Clash used the 1981 movie as their sole source of historical accuracy, so there's really little point.

From the outset of Clash of the Titans (2010), you know that either the writers have never actually heard of Greek mythology or they just somehow felt that they were skilled enough to justify completely changing 3,000-year-old tales. I'm guessing the latter. They begin the movie by explaining that the Titans ruled the world, but then that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades showed up and decided to battle them (which sounds less like succession mythology and more like Pokemon). The Olympian trio started to lose, but then Hades did a bit of black magic and sacrificed part of his own self to create a Titan of his own: the Kraken. This new weapon was then used to defeat the Titans. After victory, Zeus claimed the sky as his domain. Poseidon claimed the sea (Hollywood never realizes that Poseidon isn't called "The Earthshaker" because he goes clubbing on Friday nights), and Hades was tricked into becoming Lord of the Underworld, where he sits by himself for thousands of years, quietly plotting revenge against his brothers.

Now, I've never before said the full phrase from which we get "WTF", but it almost escaped my lips when I saw this opening segment.

From here you are introduced to Perseus, the hero of the story. With his parents supposedly dead, he gets taken in by a kind fisherman and his wife. Through the fisherman you're introduced to one of the main focuses of the plot: that Man is dissatisfied with the gods and doesn't feel that he needs them anymore. "One day," the fisherman says, "somebody's got to make a stand. One day, somebody's got to say... 'enough'."

I almost stood and said "enough" to the movie right there. To my everlasting shame, I kept watching.

Perseus grows into a man, and one day he and his family witness a group of soldiers ripping down a massive statue of Zeus. For some reason, this causes Hades to appear and wipe out all of the soldiers before sending some kind of Dragonball Z energy blast towards Perseus' fishing ship. His family dies, but he lives, naturally sustaining a severe hatred of the gods (by the way, the movie never properly explains, in my opinion, why humans hate the gods so much. They just do). Other soldiers appear and take him to Argos, where Queen Cassiopeia is busy claiming that the gods are useless ("The gods need us! They need our prayers! What do we need the gods for?" she says). Eventually she announces that her daughter, Andromeda, is better-looking than the gods themselves (though, strangely, she's not better-looking than the Andromeda from 1981), and again, Hades appears - why does HE care about a queen's vanity? - and says that if Andromeda isn't sacrificed to the Kraken in ten days, the big ugly monster will destroy Argos (and so will the Kraken, hey! a-boom-tsh!). Because it's important to the plot, Perseus wanders into the throne room just in time to witness this, and when Hades sees our hero, he tells the demigod of his true parentage: Zeus is Perseus' father. The king sends Perseus out to kill the Kraken, and we're on our way to more lessons in Greek heresy.

Argos becomes vaguely divided between those who wish to sacrifice Andromeda and those who wish to believe in Perseus, but you never get a clear sense that the city even knows who Perseus is, so I actually spent a large portion of the movie wondering "does this entire city want to die before sacrificing their princess?" The character of Andromeda was so underworked in this movie that I couldn't give a flying fart (to paraphrase a coworker) whether she lived or died. Perseus ventures out to save her, sure, but for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. There's no love interest there, no hopes that he himself will one day marry her and become king like in the old version. Perseus as a character pretty much represents Clash's version of Man in general: confused, muddled, angry and bitter for no clear reason, doing things that make no sense, utterly compassionless.

After Argos, Perseus faces more or less the same challenges that he faced in 1981, but with a few bizarre twists, most notably Io and the Djinn. Io was a name I recognized from myth but couldn't quite remember off the top of my head. In the movie she's a sort of guardian angel character cursed with immortality for little explainable reason who follows Perseus around (for NO explainable reason) and generally acts as a catalyst when the other characters can't figure out what to do themselves. She is, in other words, the lazy writer's dream. When Perseus and crew (he travels with a merry band of Argos marines whose sole purpose is to show you how the movie's monsters can kill people) would otherwise be clueless as to their next move, Io provides divine knowledge out of nowhere and keeps them moving. It's supremely lazy writing, for the hero never has to figure out anything on his own. Really, Io is the writer's guardian angel more than she is Perseus'.

As it turns out, Io in mythology was a woman with whom Zeus tried to, eh, forcibly mate, but she was a priestess of Hera, who subsequently turned her into a white cow. Where the filmmakers made the jump from "raped white cow" to "guardian angel love interest" I don't quite know. I half expected Perseus to call his Pegasus "Icarus" after that.

And the Djinn? They're the weirdos on the left in the picture up top. I'm pretty sure a Djinn is actually a spirit in Middle-Eastern mythology (where we get the word "genie"), but for some reason they show up here as mystic shamans who slowly replace parts of themselves with tree bark or something. They'd almost have been worth watching if they'd all been played by Robin Williams.

Why the hell either of these new characters are here is beyond me. They were two of the bigger "WTF" moments of the movie, but hey, the Djinn's glowing blue eyes looked cool, and Io provided the requisite warrior woman / eye candy, and isn't that what matters most?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Kraken is part of Norse mythology, not Greek. It was a big ugly sea squid who wrecked ships (one of the few things that second Pirates of the Carribean movie got right), not a city-killing, Pokemon-battling turtle with a severe tentacle problem like it is in this movie.

I don't normally comment on this kind of thing, but it's much more than the plot that bothers me about this movie: it's the sentiment. Men are angry and bitter and have no love of the gods. They constantly mock the gods, and Perseus in particular has this obsession of "being a man", even though he's a demigod and thus only half-man (perhaps he was compensating?). The gods send him gifts, like an Ancient Greek lightsaber and a cool flying horse, yet he refuses to use any of them because he wants to complete his quest "as a man". It's annoying, it's cheesy, and it completely falls apart by the end of the movie when Perseus, while still claiming to be doing the quest "as a man", finally relents and uses these godly gifts. It's like the writers wrote the whole movie with this "I can do this without the gods' help" theme, only to find that the Kraken really can't be defeated in a showy manner without these cool-looking and extra-handy gifts of the gods. The writers said, "Oh, crap" and, rather than retool the script, kept it in and just allowed Perseus to temporarily go back on everything he stands for in order to win. If that doesn't say something about today's culture, I don't know what does.

I'm fairly convinced that Hollywood doesn't know Greek myth from Christian verse. The only gods who have the slightest bit of relevance in this movie are Zeus (aka God) and Hades (aka Satan), even though Hermes and Athena were two prominent figures in the actual Perseus/Argos myth. Hollywood doesn't understand that Greek myths had nothing to do with "good vs. evil", but I suppose that Hollywood's not completely through with showing its pictures in black and white yet. Zeus acts like the Christian God does in the Flood story of Genesis (which itself, curiously, is a take on flood myths from other cultures that don't include Greek). Zeus decides that humans need to be punished for their unwillingness to worship him unless Perseus can save the day.

Why Hades is always portrayed as "evil" is easy to see: he's the God of the Dead. He rules the underworld. Satan rules Hell. Therefore, Hades = Satan, right? Perhaps when viewed through a Judeo-Christian lens, but that's completely not the character he was to the Greeks. ALL humans went to the underworld when they died - even the good ones - so Hades was, in effect, the God of Hell and Heaven. He punished the bad, but he also rewarded the good. Think of him more as a judge than a demon. In many ways, he was the kindest and most fair of all the gods, particularly between the "big three" of Zeus, Poseidon, and himself. The Greeks attributed thunder storms to Zeus and earthquakes and tsunamis to Poseidon; therefore, they had the tempestuous personalities to match. But Hades? He was usually pretty chill.

In this movie he's bent on expanding his kingdom to include the Earth, but I don't think that's how Death would really act. Other filmmakers did the same thing to the Percy Jackson movie, though in the Lightning Thief book Hades was tired, and passive, and didn't want to have to deal with the constant flow of soul-traffic headed his way. War was a strain on Hades; disasters were a nightmare. This is the same view that Markus Zusak took in his excellent novel The Book Thief, wherein Death (the narrator) is a tired old thing who only manages to stay sane in his depressing job by observing colors. Brilliant book. You should read it. So should Hollywood.

But they won't.

They're too comfortable with the simplicity of the good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, Harry Potter vs. Voldemort (did I mention that the guy who plays Voldemort, Ralph Fiennes, plays Hades here? He does so brilliantly, I must admit; his voice feels old and whispery, like he himself is on the verge of death. The poor guy's becoming type-cast as modern-day Satans). Hollywood doesn't understand Greek mythology and its chaotic nature, the way gods turn on each other and each other's children, the way that there was never intended to be a strictly "evil" or "good" god, or the way that heroes were heroes because they did supernatural feats with the gods' help. That doesn't make sense to Hollywood, I guess. Their wars can only have two sides, black vs. white, and you aren't allowed to cheer for both. Maybe someday they'll begin to see colors, like Death in The Book Thief.

When I came out of this movie, I tried to think of something optimistic to say for my review. The best that I came up with was "it's the best movie I've ever seen in which Sam Worthington plays a reluctant hero who spends 3/4ths of the final battle sequence astride a winged beast", as a playful jab at Avatar, a movie of which I am not especially fond, to say the least. But as soon as I thought that, I realized a terrible, terrible truth. It wasn't right. I didn't really think that. It forced me to say something which I NEVER thought I'd say. Avatar was better. Oh, gods, now I have to go wash my hands and burn my keyboard. Ugh.

Oh, and this movie employs the "shaky cam" effect in all of its action scenes. This can be done well (see: the Bourne movies), but usually, as is the case with this movie, it's a sad, sorry gimmick that serves two functions: covering up the actors' inability to do coordinated fight scenes, and making the viewer too dizzy and sick to care. Watching it in 3D - and apparently it wasn't filmed for that medium - only makes it worse. If you MUST see this movie, see it in 2D, or better yet, wait until it's out on video and RiffTrax has had a chance to thoroughly mock it.