Clash of the Titans (?)
By Christopher M. Cassidy, Staff Writer
Clash of the Titans, remake of the 1981 film bearing the same name, is close to the worst real movie I have ever seen. The director, Louis Leterrier says he is “a huge fan of the original film. It was my first magic movie, and I was wowed by it.” And that he “jumped at the chance to make his own version.” To begin, why remake something that you loved? You remake things that are rubbish, things that have potential to go somewhere with; to improve, not something you love. Anyways, the script is terrible. They repeat themselves a million times and the language is simple and not particularly interesting. The title is completely inaccurate (there are no titans involved in the movie whatsoever), and the acting is completely wooden. Perseus acts like he knows that the director is going to save him, and seems to not have any fear at all. Io tries to take the Obi-Wan Kenobi position of the powerful, wise, and mysterious master by doing some weird and unexplained magic thing to prepare “already prepared” Perseus for a fight with Medusa, but ends up looking like a fool. The sort of fake, not-really-there I’ll go so far as to call it a romantic element is so boring and impalpable that you don’t even want to try to figure it out. The interaction between human characters is completely without merit. The director kills off most of the grand army of 20 people (also lame), so only the main, main, main characters actually matter. The characters themselves are not loveable at all: Zeus is so stuck up that you don’t like him, Hades is downright evil, Perseus (improperly labeled as the son of Zeus) is an unintelligent, rash brute who only lives because of movie luck, and Io (supposedly a nymph turned into a cow and sent to Egypt but a person in the movie) is just plain pathetic; always needing the hero to save her, etc. What you’re left with is wiz-o special effects and a series of set pieces that leave you thinking Is this one any better than the last? If you’re an 8-year-old boy and you want to see giant scorpions charging around, have fun. But I just can’t stand sitting around in a theater watching some dribblesome bore waltz around in a Greek battle skirt showing off his muscles swinging around a plastic sword in the most ridiculous form for troops living off of crackers. So, you stretch, you lean back, you yawn, take a sip of water, and you feel the rest of your lower body start to go numb, and you decide that your money was wasted, and see the kraken. To begin, they got the monster all wrong, giving it a torso and arms and claws and a head, etc, but also, there’s nothing new that you haven’t seen in the trailer. Is it not odd that they show you the monster?! There’s another thing too. After the success of things like Avatar, we are told that everything has to be in 3-D. Now, it’s one thing to have James Cameron design and shoot with 72 cameras for 3-D, but to shoot in 2-D, put it through a computer process that bungles around with it and turns it into 3-D and then charge you extra for the privilege of seeing something transformed into 3-D is completely BANANAS! The director said that he “designed many of the shots with this visual style in mind; stepping INTO new worlds and having big creatures coming AT you.” That means you want to design it with depth… But unless you’re directing a kindergarten show where everyone is a cardboard figure on a stick, EVERY MOVIE HAS DEPTH! That’s the DUMBEST reason for 3-Dification that I’ve ever heard! If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie, just without the headache-inducing spectacle of watching a movie shot in 2-D and then turned into 3-D with some big monsters that through the miracle of 3-Dification are made to look SMALLER, sitting there thinking Oh for goodness’ sake can we just STOP THIS NOW?!
-Some elements of this article were inspired by my beloved film critic Mark Kermode
