text: Clash of the Titans (2010) List Price: $28.98 Price: $16.99 find out more information Buy posters from this movie by David Cornelius 
   
   "Forget the kraken, how 'bout releasing a plot?" 
   
   The newly remade “Clash of the Titans” is what happens when a couple Hollywood producers are convinced a three thousand-year-old legend could use a little punch-up. “OK, so, like, I dig the story and all, but I’ve got some notes. First, the hero, he’s all squeaky clean and stuff. Folks don’t buy that anymore. We need to make him angry at the gods, you know, a pissed-off rebel who wants to do everything on his own. But can you beef up the roles for the other warriors? You know, maybe have one of them be a mentor type, so we can have a couple training scenes? Those are easy to film, and we’ve seen them a hundred times before. Old ideas make me comfortable. I also like the long journey - make sure we get lots of swooping helicopter shots of the men walking across snowy mountains and grassy fields and stuff, just like in ‘Lord of the Rings.’ Oh, and make sure all of the guys dress like the characters in ‘300,’ because that movie made a ton of cash. We need to add a hot chick in there, too, someone who can join the mission. I know the princess has to stay in the city, so just throw someone else in there, and make sure she’s hot. Hot chicks are hot. And since the hero is mad at the gods, everyone should be, too. Ooh, yeah, maybe that’s what’s the problem - everyone’s mad at the gods, and they’re mad right back. I don’t get this whole ‘pettiness of the gods reflects the foibles of man’ business. What the hell’s a ‘foible,’ anyway? Just make ’em pissed off. One of the gods can be the bad guy. How about Hades? He’s, like, the bad god, right, like the devil or something? Yeah. Make him the bad guy. The other bad guy, what’s his name? Calibos? I don’t get this whole curse thing. Just make him secretly related to the hero instead. Oh, and we need to have a badass genie in there. Genies are Greek, right?” 
   
   
   
   And that’s only half of it. Sure, the 1981 “Titans” was a mish-mash of mythology, too, but at least those filmmakers managed to work an actual story out of their Greek myth stew; the three writers credited on this remake forget to include much of an actual plot, or character, or logic. It’s as if the script was based not on Beverly Cross’ original screenplay, but on the recollections of someone who watched the older film a couple years ago while drunk. We get the main story points, usually in order, but the dots never connect. 
   
   
   
   (It doesn’t help that director Louis Leterrier - who made “The Incredible Hulk” and “Unleashed,” so we know he can deliver when necessary - makes most of the action sequences so frenetic and poorly staged that we can never really tell what’s going on, to whom, and where. It’s not enough for this movie to not make sense from scene to scene; it lacks logic within those scenes, too.) 
   
   
   
   The revised story explains, via bulky voiceover exposition, how the gods are losing their powers because humanity isn’t worshiping them enough these days. (The gods apparently get their power from prayer. But how did they get their power before people were around? Hey, man, just roll with it.) When a gang of soldiers from Argos riot and destroy a statue of Zeus, the gods strike back by letting Hades (Ralph Fiennes) unleash some gargoyle-ish thingies upon the seaside. Alas, this also leads to the drowning death of a kindly fisherman (Pete Postlethwaite) and his family - but not their adopted son, Perseus (Sam Worthington, inexplicably wearing his “Avatar” crew cut and only bothering to hide is Aussie accent in half the scenes), who’s revealed to be the son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). 
   
   
   
   Perseus winds up in Argos and, like any good hero, ends up not doing anything for the first ninety minutes of the movie. Sure, he learns how to swordfight from noble warrior Draco (Mads Mikkelsen), and there’s a whole heap of talk about how important he is, but really, he does nothing. For an entire three quarters of the film. Nothing. 
   
   
   
   Well, he does manage to whine. Oh, Perseus is a whiner, through and through. He’s mad at the gods for killing his family, and once he discovers his true heritage - a revelation so clumsily handled we can’t blame Worthington too much for not bothering to react in any way to it - he decides he must refuse to “become like them,” a phrase repeated throughout the script but never fully explained. Become like how they’re powerful, you mean? Like how a couple of them are evil? Or is this just a “I can man up and do it on my own” chunk of macho gumption? 
   
   
   
   I’m not so certain it’s the latter, although I am certain the screenwriters thought it would be. Themes of self-reliance abound, with Perseus repeatedly rejecting gifts from the gods - except, of course, when the plot calls for him to use those gifts. Then he’s OK doing that. You bet I’ll use Zeus’ magic lightsaber-y sword to kill the baddies, and yessiree, I’ll gladly participate in multiple - and quite literal - dei ex machinis to get me out of some sticky situations, and, oh, hey, thanks for the Pegasus, too, but make no mistake: I’m doing this alone, like a real man! 
   
   
   
   So Perseus is in Argos, and he stumbles into a bit of insider politics as the queen (Polly Walker) gloats that her daughter (Alexa Davelos) is more beautiful than the goddesses, which is enough to anger… well, it’s supposed to anger Thetis, but nobody really bothered giving any of the non-Zeus/Hades gods any lines, so Hades shows up instead, relaying the message that Thetis is royally cheesed by the queen’s talk. It’s Hades who whips up the “sacrifice the princess or we’ll level Argos” threat. (By the end of the picture, the kraken does enough damage either way; I think they just wanted to show some major monster destruction and didn’t care if it mattered within the plot.) 
   
   
   
   Once the locals find out Perseus is a demigod, they shanghai him into joining Draco on some vague quest to find out how to stop the kraken. Perseus, being a grade-A ineffective hero, requires much convincing. Eventually they ride off, encountering giant scorpions and wicked monsters and strange genies made of wood (yes, really), and every single time, Perseus does nothing; it’s his cohorts who save the day. Perseus’ job here is to swing his sword a couple times, fall over, and get rescued by nameless beefy supporting characters. The poor lug doesn’t even get more than a handful of sentences in dialogue until somewhere around the midway point. 
   
   
   
   Joining them on this voyage is Io (Gemma Arterton), a former lover of Zeus, cursed to eternal life and eternal beauty. (They left out the part of the myth where Io is turned into a cow. I suppose once you’ve cast someone who looks like Gemma Arterton, you’re smart enough to keep her in human form as long as possible.) Io has been watching over Perseus his entire life and has now decided to hang around out in the open. Because the plot requires it, the two fall in love (in as best a display of affection Worthington can muster while still maintaining a complete absence of charisma or personality). 
   
   
   
   But wait, what about the princess? Wasn’t she the love interest? Doesn’t the addition of Io give the princess nothing to do? Doesn’t making her a non-entity undermine the importance of her impending sacrifice? Doesn’t her reappearance late in the film merely distract us from what we thought was the main story? Those are such good points. It’s a shame the screenwriters didn’t think of them. 
   
   
   
   Everything that follows is a half-baked checklist of half-remembered moments from the original film, only cranked up in an effort to be bigger and louder, if not more effective. (Even Bubo the mechanical owl shows up, in a ten-second throwaway joke that plays about as subtly and as cleverly as having Harry Hamlin jog across the screen while shouting “I’m Harry Hamlin and I was in the original film! Now back to the remake!”) The plot carries our heroes from point to point and monster to monster, but there’s no rhythm to it, no appreciation for the story as a whole, no purpose to the adventure besides getting us to the next hollow set piece. You could rearrange half these scenes and still wind up with the same movie. 
   
   
   
   It’s only until all of Perseus’ sidekicks are killed off - either due to Perseus’ incompetence or their having to display courage because, sheesh, somebody has to in this movie - that the meathead finally mans up and takes the lead. (At this point, we have twenty minutes left in the film.) He fights Calibos (Jason Flemyng), a villain done up like a Klingon burn victim and messily reduced to the role of Hades’ toadie, perhaps because everyone insisted the character remain in the film but nobody bothered to think up a reason to keep him around. Then it’s off to defeat the kraken, in a scene that combines all the tedium of a bland CG special effect with all the inelegance of a sloppily written climax. 
   
   
   
   Meanwhile, we have the gods themselves. The writers tried their hardest to make them more vital to the plot, not quite understanding the whole point of gods-as-manipulators. This leaves us with plenty of shouty exchanges which eventually boil down to an effort by Hades to overthrow Zeus - the sort of thing that probably sounded important during a pitch meeting but ultimately comes off as filler. Back on solid ground, there’s not much happening. There are battles and escapes and dire warnings, to be sure, but it’s all as clumsy and as empty and as faux-epic as a Michael Bay movie. It’s Perseus on the road to nowhere. At least the 1981 crew remembered to have things actually happen in between the Harryhausen bits. 
   
   
   
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   originally posted: 04/03/10 07:50:43 
   
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   ||||| We begin today’s review with a public service announcement: 
   
   The new mythological adventure/fantasy film “Clash of the Titans” is advertised as a 3D production and tickets are priced accordingly -- which is to say, at about one-and-a-third times the cost of a ticket to a plain-old 2D movie. 
   
   Well, it ain’t worth it. 
   
   I’m not talking about the quality of the film itself, which is not very high -- although not as low as you probably (and understandably) fear/expect. 
   
   Rather, I’m talking about the sheer awful quality of the 3D transfer of the film. “Clash” was shot in standard format, then gussied up to add a small bit of depth on the screen and considerably more at the boxoffice. A mere handful of shots have a feel of multi-dimensional immersion. But that number is small in comparison to the 3D sensation afforded by, oh, “How to Train Your Dragon,” which was made expressly for the 3D format, or even “Alice in Wonderland,” which, like “Clash,” was retrofit for 3D but with a more studied hand. 
   
   And, of course, all of those pale next to “Avatar,” a film which “Clash” continually calls to mind for reasons not entirely its own fault. Because, you see, if the filmmaking and 3D effects aren’t anything like those in “Avatar,” other things, alas, are. 
   
   “Clash,” you see, stars “Avatar”’s Sam Worthington as -- get this -- a half-human/half-not-human hybrid whose quest to drive evil from his planet involves riding a winged beast that no man has ever mastered and settling an internal conflict about which portion of his nature should command his loyalty. 
   
   Obviously, “Clash” isn’t an “Avatar” knock-off -- it’s far too soon even for the most opportunistic filmmaker to pull that trick. Rather, it’s loosely based on the laughably stoic and dated 1981 “Clash of the Titans,” which was itself loosely inspired by the Greek myths involving Perseus, a demi-god (in this case, a son of Zeus and a human mother) who fought off such beasties as the Medusa and a gigantic sea monster (or Kraken) in his rise to become, later in life, a beloved king. 
   
   In this telling, Perseus (Worthington) watches as the fisherman who adopted him as a foundling is killed by the god Hades (Ralph Fiennes), who’s engaged in crushing a human insurrection against the rule of Zeus (Liam Neeson). Hades has threatened to destroy the city of Argos by unleashing the Kraken unless the city offers its princess as a sacrifice, and Perseus, though mistrusted by the humans because of his godly parentage, leads a small band intent on destroying the Kraken and sending Hades back to the underworld. 
   
   “Clash” is basically a quest story, broken up with fights against monsters (a couple of which are pretty cool, actually) and some truly limp and ill-played attempts at humor (a pair of hunters with Yakov Smirnoff accents join Perseus’ crew for no discernable reason). Fiennes and, as Argos’ senior solider, Mads Mikkelson, afford some juicy fun, but Worthington projects the charisma of the young Russell Crowe’s lighting double. And there’s a fair bit of gore for a PG-13 film, for what that’s worth. 
   
   But the going is pretty slim here. Director Louis Leterrier (“The Incredible Hulk”) cannot stoke any of the film’s elements -- semi-romance, personal salvation narrative, or, most importantly, dramatic adventure -- into anything engrossing. It all passes quickly, as far as that goes, but when it’s over it passes entirely. And something that sells for a premium price ought to linger. 
   
   (98 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: C ||||| Clash Of The Titans (Film) 
   
   Rating: M Running Time: 106 Director: Louis Leterrier Cast: Alexa Davalos, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, Sam Worthington Distributor: Roadshow Release Date: April 01, 2010 Film Worth: $3.00 FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth 
   
   A big, loud, uninvolving mess played by actors who arenít even taking the film seriously 
   
   It's in 3-D! It's a remake! It cost millions to make! It's directed by a hack! It's filled with slick, over-used CGI! The dialogue is terrible! The characters are cardboard cut-outs! Yes! Welcome to the latest market-research-driven, soul-dead Hollywood blockbuster! It's Clash Of The Titans! As the American film industry continues to triumph at the box office but dies a long, protracted death when it comes to creativity and originality, this idiotic "event movie" pretty much sums up everything that's wrong with Hollywood right now. It's big, it's loud, and it's filled with meaningless action...and it also feels like not one single person involved with the production could give two hoots. 
   
   Based on the kitschy, ridiculous but vaguely enjoyable 1981 adventure of the same name (most famous for its excessive use of togas, and the wonderful stop-motion animated work of the legendary Ray Harryhausen), Clash Of The Titans is set in ancient Greece, and follows the battle waged between God and man. As Zeus (Liam Neeson) tries to teach the humans a lesson for disregarding him, he unleashes his evil brother Hades (Ralph Fiennes) upon them, with demi-God Perseus (Sam Worthington) - the bastard son of Zeus - getting caught up in the middle. Only he can kill the Kraken, a massive sea creature which will be dragged from the bottom of the ocean to teach the Greeks the ultimate lesson. To learn how to kill the Kraken, Perseus has to journey across the land to get a tip from three witches, who tell him that the secret lies with the evil Medusa. 
   
   Though stupid right from the premise, director Louis Leterrier and screenwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (it took three people to write this?) add to the idiocy with reams of arch, ridiculous dialogue, plenty of plot holes, and characters that make little to no sense. The performances follow suit. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes look suspiciously like they're taking the piss, hamming it up deluxe, and playing in an acting style that wouldn't look out of place in a cheap local pantomime. Meanwhile, "man of the moment" Sam Worthington's character should have been called Aussieus for all the effort he takes in masking his down under accent. Though left to struggle with dialogue that would hobble even Meryl Streep, the hardly expressive Wortho is particularly wooden here, as if he was trying to make the job easier for the people designing his action figure. Only charismatic Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen comes out unscathed as Wortho's hardman sidekick. 
   
   As Clash Of The Titans rolls on, it begins to feel more and more like a video game, with each new adventure emanating the vibe of a new "level" on your XBOX or PS3. The overly edited action sequences are almost impossible to follow, ironically rendering them dull and tedious, and they're made even more incomprehensible by the use of 3-D. The result is a blurry, uninvolving mess, but you know...whatever. Nobody involved with Clash Of The Titans seems to have cared about the film...and - by the Gods! - neither should you.
target: – In Clash Sam Worthington plays a half mortal hopelessly in love and stuck between two worlds. Sound familiar? This remake aims for Avatar, but falls short. Though it has expensive effects (3D!) and stars (Ralph Fiennes!), it even falls short of the cheerfully cheesy original. This movie manages to make Avatar's plot look sophisticated, writes Dana Stevens on Slate. "Compared with this witless, chaotic mess of a movie, James Cameron's epic looks worthy of the ancient Greek authors." Peter Sobczynski of eFilmCritic says Clash "not only amplifies all of the flaws of the original but even screws up the things that it actually got right the first time around." "It's big, it's loud, and it's filled with meaningless action," says FILMINK's Erin Free. The film "pretty much sums up with what's wrong with Hollywood right now." Ralph Fiennes, does fine, says the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. Worthington, however, projects "the charisma of the young Russell Crowe's lighting double."