Clash Of The Titans film review

Clash Of The Titans is as shallow and uninspired a film can get, all it is an hour and 50 minutes of CGI, terrible character development, and a main character so uninteresting and pointless that he might as well be a card board cut out. The film is directed by Louis Leterrier and stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades. There are more characters but they honestly get barely any screen time, Danny Huston for example plays Poseidon and he only gets 1 line, no seriously one line, in the original film he was at least a supporting character. All the actors and actresses portraying the gods appear to be mute for the entire movie as they do absolutely nothing to advance the plot or even help the movie for that matter. I mean why would you get all these people, dress them up like prats and then make them gawp at the camera for most of the movie, Its not interesting or resourceful, that money used to pay those people could have been spent on a better movie experience. The film is a remake of the Ray Harryhausen produced classic that was released in 1981, and I can easily say that after watching the original I personally think that the original is a far superior film, the original has all the things that the remake lacks such as character development, a solid motivation for each character, a interesting and diverse cast of characters, and a much more inspired production. The original was great on it own and their was no need for this modern Hollywood turd of a movie.


Does the movie industry have no original ideas now, all it is remakes and the occasional direct to DVD sequel. We need much more creative film making than this, im finding my self watching classics of the past just to watch a good movie, films such as the Akira Kurosawa samurai movies, or the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Films that actually went down in history as something to be remembered and honoured, but now what do we have, Twilight , High School Musical, all this pointless and meaning less junk that floods the film scene and turns the movie goer experience into a raving nightmare of musical numbers and melodramatic vampire romances, what happened to movies they just stopped becoming entertaining. Its thanks to people like Quinton Tarintino that films are still somewhat what fresh as he is a director who pays homage’s to all the classic films of our time, from the westerns, to the samurai movie, to the revenge flick, to the pulp crime stories of the past. Watch pulp fiction or kill bill or even reservoir dogs and you will witness the greatness of film history that is now days overshadowed by the current idea of a movie. All this vampire obsession is turning into a genre I like to call Vamploitation. Its where you take the idea of the vampire and try to exploit the success of the twilight franchise in order to make a quick profit.

Any way the plot of Clash Of The Titans goes like this, Zeus conceives the character of Perseus with mortal which makes Perseus a demigod, Perseus and his mother are cast away as outcasts because of this and are set adrift is a casket in to the ocean. They are later found by a couple who after realising the mother is dead decide to adopt him as their own( reminds me of Superman). Mean while people are angry at the Gods which makes the Gods respond by killing many people. Perseus now an adult is fishing with his family until they are killed by the means of Hades. This angers Perseus and makes him set out for revenge on the Gods. Meanwhile on mount Olympus Hades plans to over throw the current Gods by tricking Zeus into releasing the Gods greatest weapon the Kraken in order to destroy cities and kill in order to create despair and darkness, which makes Hades Stronger. After a while Perseus comes across soldiers who he joins to help stop the Kraken that will soon be released, which if it does will claim the life of the requested sacrifice Princess Andromeda. This sets them off on a quest for Medusas head which along the way involves giant CGI scorpions and tons of unforgettable and unoriginal characters.


While my brief synopsis is not very easy to follow that’s because the movie is not easy to follow, it’s one of the few times I have seen such a shallow movie have such a complex and confusing narrative. They have changed so much from the original in ways that it completely destroys many plot points form the original that were necessary to the overall experiences. For example in the original Andromeda is Perseus’s main reason for embarking on this quest, but in this movie Andromeda is now a simple and barely mentioned plot device that in a strange way acts as a secondary motivation that’s barely expanded on. You don’t feel like this character exists as she is barely featured, it mostly focuses on a new character created for the film that wasn’t in the original called Lo. Lo is the replacement for Andromeda in the quest for Medusas head and does nothing new to the film or even becomes an interesting character. There’s a scene where she is killed and I didn’t even care because I didn’t fell connected to this barely mentioned, and waste of a character. You didn’t care when she was dead because like most of the characters in this film there practically dead anyway since they don’t do anything for the film, I almost expected them to be CGI as well because surely no one would pay an actress just to mysteriously stare into the camera using her most bland facial expression. And the funny thing is that’s practically what they did, I mean why bother with all these character if all their going to do is die or speak uninspired dialogue. My favourite character trait in this movie is Hades since he speaks with this raspy wheezy voice as if he just smoked a whole pack a cigarettes. The idea of Gods smoking is a strange but compelling image because even Gods need to relax after a hard days work of committing genocide to the race they helped create. And for some reason all the Gods apart form Hades wear this really shinny armour which makes them look like vampires in the sunlight or something, also it looks ridiculous I mean even a rock group wouldn’t wear stuff like that on stage it just makes the Gods seem like walking headlights. I recommend wearing shades so that you don’t lose your eye sight to the Gods destructive shinny armour. Also I think some of the actors playing the Gods have fake beards which is possibly the worst costume choice I have ever seen, well apart from the eye exploding radioactive armour that the Gods wear.


I will now talk about the action sequences in this movie and also about how bad some of them are. There is a scene where they fight these giant scorpions that lasts what feels like a decade of dramatic set pieces and people getting thrown across the screen as if they were made of paper, its absolute chaos, pillars are smashed people are killed swords fly all over the place as if they having a seizure. And while all this was happening I realised something, the 3d effect was barely used in scenes that could have utilised it perfectly, what’s the point of converting this film into 3d if your not going to create exiting 3d set pieces. On the subject of the 3d in this movie all I can say is that’s its down right pointless, I saw it in 3d to get a better movie experience( strangly enough I was exited to see this movie before I realised it was a turd biscuit). Any way the 3d is no Avatar experiences, the reason is because the film was not filmed using James Cameron’s 3d camera technology meaning it was converted to 3d after the film has finished production. This choice was made because of the success of Avatar and its 3d. Anyway the action is mindless point less and incredibly over the top for a Greek mythology themes movie.

The acting is terrible, these characters are not given any personality or any interesting performances and this makes the characters nothing more than devices used for the sole purpose of action sequences and poor writing. Perseus is such a bland character compared to Harry Hamlin’s portrayal of the character in the original film. All Perseus does in this movie is kill things and that’s about it. While the other characters are their to either be killed or to make really bad attempts at comedy. You could easily make the film with hand puppets and static images and it would still be the same movie, that’s how bad and pointless the performances are in this movie.

And the choice of music is just ridiculous, it uses a remix of a rock song………in a Greek mythology setting, are you kidding me, that makes no sense because it does not fit the movies theme or ideas, what kind of crack were they smoking when they decided on that music choice. The imagery in this movie can be good at times but most times it looks like they took too much inspiration from lord of the rings and decided to just use the same environment.


Overall this movie actually baffled me because it was a good example of what a modern Hollywood piece of crap it actually was. It blew the lid of the crap barrel and reached a solid 10 on the diarrhoea meter (ironically diarrhoea is a Greek word ). This movie made me think about how movies today rely on style over substance and completely offer no sense of depth or creativity. Watch the original it has more depth and creativity than this movie. The original features a great cast, great visual effects by Ray Harryhausen which are done mostly with stop motion animation which I find to be one of the best practical ways of creating the monsters for the film. The original is a more complete experience and a much more compelling one as well. These remakes are getting out of control and they seem to get more popular over time which offers the question what other classics are going to be remade? And should you see the originals first, defiantly see the originals first as you will find no matter how old or how outdated the classics may be they still shine through movie history with films such as the original The Day The Earth Stood Still or even films such as the original Nightmare On Elm Street. The classics are always usually better than their modern day counterparts. Overall I recommend the original Clash Of The Titans and not the 2010 remake. After seeing this film I started seeing other films deemed classics, films such as the samurai movie Yojimbo directed by Akira Kurosawa and western such as The Good The Bad And The Ugly directed by Sergio Leone, now those are movies. The remake of Clash Of The Titans is a perfect example of a film in which the original is still a classic even till this day.