Clash of the Titans (for those who have seen it, spoilers)

Cafe Society
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OK – general comments, comparing this to the original version, and the real myth. Anything positive about this movie gets a :slight_smile: . Anything negative gets a :mad: .

1.) It’s pretty clear that the writers, deliberately or not, ignored the real myth altogether and based the film directly on the original 1981 film, with other stuff mixed in. That’s legitimate, as long as you know it upfront. But it also means that anyone expecting anything resembling the original story is going to feel a lot of WTF moments. And, to be fair, there are a lot of places were the Standard Myth could use improving.

2.) You’d think the myth of Perseus would be the perfect myth to turn into an action-adventure flick. It’s not one of those Great Myths that explain how The World WasCreated, or Why We Have Seasons, or Where We Got Wheat, or whatever. This has akllowed generations of classicists to dismiss it consecendingly as “not much more than a folktale”. Ironically, for this version of Clash of the Titans they tried to turn it into something more – it’s Hades vs. Zeus, with the Fate of Mankind and the Gods in the Balance. And Hades has invested much of hos power in the Kraken, so if it falls, so does he.

Gimme a break. This is piling on way too much, and it’s all derivative. The Zeus vs. Hades is from the Disney version of Hercules. The whole idea of Hades and Zeus as diametrically opposed brothers, with Hades as the Evil One Trying to Take Over is completely foreign to Greek myth (the gods did object to Zeus on occassion, but he reminded them he was strong enough to take them on en masse.). So is the “invested all his strength in one creature/talisman” trope, which is a direct ripoff from Lord of the Rings. (And, again, not really like anything in Greek Myth). You’d think that, recognizing that ripoffs like Bubo the Own weren’t a good idea, they’d avoid doing it themselves. Obviously not :mad:

3.) So Danae is shown as the wife of Acrisius, not his wife, and she dies when exposed in the box that’s thrown into the sea. Then Acrisius gets his comeuppance immediately as Zeus skewers him with a lightning bolt and turns him into the Phantom of the Opera. (ripoff!)

I’m actually OK with much of this. They made Danae the wife to make things simple (although having Zeus take the form of Acrisius is a ripoff of the myth of Amphytrio and Hercules. Not to mention Uther Pendragon and Arthur. Screenwriters need to broaden their range of myths), and I can see that Danae had to die if Perseus was to be raised in ignorance of his background. That’s not really necessary, of course, but the reveal of finding out you’re a demigod is always neat. It worked for Percy Jackson. :slight_smile:

As for Acrisius getting his immediately, that’s OK, too. In the original myth, Acrisius throws Danae and Perseus into the sea because of a prophecy that his grandson would kill him. He does die until after all the other events of the myth, when he flees Argos and Perseus goes after him, only to kill him by accident at some funeral games. That’s profoundly unsatisfying – no “You are Acrisius. You killed my mother. Prepare to die!” moment. In 1981, they had Zeus squeeze his terra cotta statue and give him a voodoo heart attack, or something.

4.) So the Argosians declatre War on the Gods by tipping a giant statue of Zeus into the ocean, to which Hades responds and kills all the soldiers, not to mention Perseus’ foster family. Whoziwhatsis? Boy, those Argosians are dumb. Again, you’ll look in vain for anything like this in Greek myths. But it provides Perseus with his Motivation. Every hero needs Motivation, especially when it’s for something as foolhardy as taking on the Gorgon. In the original myth, Perseus takes a foolish vow to bring back the head of the Gorgon as a wedding present, part of his plan to keep the evil King Polydektes of Seriphos from putting moves on his mom. But we don’t have Danae anymore, we never go to Seriphos (the movie acts as if Argos is the only city in Greece), there;s no Polydektes, and I guess they wouldn’t have thought a vow motivation enough. In Beverley Cross/ 1981 script, Perseus is motivated by his love for Andromeda and his need to save her. Here, Perseus’ goal is the destruction of Hades in particular and the Gods in general. That’s pretty damned ambitious. :mad:

5.) So we get to Argos, and it’s a huge city hemmed in on all sides by fantastic cliffs and set against the sea. Right. Argus was on the sea in its prime, but those cliffs are as real as the ones in the Disney Pocahontas.

And Kepheos and Kassiopeia rule Argis??? They’re the king and queen on Joppa or Ethiopia, depending on your soyurce. (Cross opted for Joppa). Okay, they’re trying to keep it simple – every damned thing happens in the same place.

Then Hades sucks the life out of Cassiopeia for her impertinent remark, which is admittedly snarkier here than in any version I’ve previously encountered, but still. This movie suffers from “Serious Death Syndrome” – they try to make everything seem more important by having people die, eve if they didn’t die in other versions. Danae, Cassiopeia – you just know you’re going to be walking over more corpses than in Hamlet by the end.

More to come.

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Bastards!!!

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I think Io annoyed me most of all. Io was a heifer! She never spurned Zeus’s advances and he turned her into a cow so he wouldn’t get caught. Then she wandered around as a cow for a while* crossed the Bosphorus and set up shop elsewhere. And she was cursed with agelessness. If they really needed a different love interest they could have just used a different name instead of bastardizing yet another myth.

*I heard she stayed a cow for a while because they needed the milk. Ba-dump-bump thank you, don’t forget to tip your waiters.

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My wife and I were really looking forward to seeing it (even if there was no plot, we figured the effects would be great) but every review of it I’ve seen panned the film, and David Stratton gave it a lowly two stars in The Australian, so we’ve decided to give it a miss since it’s apparently crap. Which is a shame… how do you get a movie in which Gods & Heroes & Monsters fight wrong???

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Are you saying that Sam Worthington is just a big sap? :smiley: I probably shouldn’t venture this opinion, since I seem to be the last remaining person around who hasn’t seen Avatar, but the general impression I’ve gotten of him (mainly from commercials and trailers and probably some bland TV interviews and publicity bits) is that he’s a black hole of charisma, a walking void of anti-charisma. I’m being terribly unfair to him, but that’s my reading of him so far.

As for the Babel of accents, NPR’s movie critic Bob Mondello wryly noted the confusing juxtaposition of Liam Neeson’s strong Irish brogue and Worthington’s unmistakable Aussie inflections. At least with the original Clash of the Titans, they had a sort of accent convention in which the gods on Olympus spoke with posh English accents (AFAICrecall), and the humans (and Perseus, who is half-human) doing the fighting & suffering were Americans (well, Harry Hamlin, anyway). It sounds like they didn’t follow a similar schema with the remake.

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Wasn’t really thinking in terms of the actual myth, just as she was portrayed in this film. With these kinds of movies, comparing the characters to the myths just adds a layer of insanity and frustration.

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6.) So Hades – who’s all-powerful and everything, but still can’t get the soot stains off his hands — appears with his Balrog-wing trademark soot cape behind him and sucks up the essence of the Argosian warriors, or something, but Perseus he leaves alone, apparently recognizing him as Zeus’ son. His remark makes everyone else think he’s a demigod, as well. Were I Hades, I’d have wiped out Perseus right then and there (“Oopsie!” I’d tell Zeus later, if he asked. These things happen.), and saved myself a lot of trouble. But because he lets everyone know or suspect Perseus is a demigod, they start treating him like one, and out he goes with a troop of soldiers to find a way to get rid of the Kraken. Their only plan is evidently to threaten the Stygian Witches, but at least it’s something.
“What do we take?” one of the men asks. “Take Everything!” says Draco, the leader. My scoutmaster would have hated him. Also my wife, who accuses me of packing too much. “What about this?” asks Perseus, picking up the mechanical Bubo the owl, direct from the 1981 film. “Leave it!” snarks Draco. One of the best lines in the film, comparable to Daniel Craig’s reply to “Do you want the martini shaken or stirred?” in Casino Royale : “Do I look like I care?” :slight_smile:

7.) Hades visits Acrisius in his trademark cloud of soot and gives him the power of wire walking. Apparently this is to give himself Plausible Deniability, since he evidently can;'t bring himself to off Perseus directly. Acrisius seems to be calling himself Calibos these days, and serves the purpose of Calibos in the original film. For those of you keeping score at home, Calibos was Andromeda’s suitor, who got changed by Zeus into a horned monstrosity and lived in a swamp with his hangers-on in the 1981 film. Cross evidently used him in place of Phineus in the original myth – Andromeda’s original suitor, who eventually turned Cepheus and Cassiopeia against Perseus, but they made him deformed to be visually interesting and to give Harryhausen something to animate. And “Phineus” doesn’t sound evil enough. “Calibos” was evidently derived from “Caliban”, out of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban, it’s generally agreed, got his name from Carib, the name of the Caribbean Indians who were seen as the models for the Savage Indian. The word also gave us the word “cannibal”. Lotsa bad associations here, and we’ll ignore the calumny on the put-upon American Indians. There were plenty of Greek names they could’ve used – why pilfer Shakespeare? I’m criticizing Cross here, of course, from the original flick. But then, he also pilfered “Kraken” from Scandinavia, too.
8.) Now we get Io, the ageless woman who’s been watching Perseus all her lifge, because she has nothing better to do. Using narrators is clumsy in films like this, so she’s our all-purpose expositor and commentator, a role played by Burgess Meredith (Ammon) in the 1981 film. Gemma Atherton is a lot easier on the eyes, despite Meredith’s character actor chops. I’m not even bothered that much by their using the name Io for her. The same names re-appear over and over again in the myths, but I can’t help thinking of her as a cow, nonetheless. Most people don’t know enough mythology to be bothered by this – although MilliCal did.

Cross, as I said, knew his myths, and often slyly threw in lots of references to them. Ammon was a playwright and poet, who wrote about Perseus by his own admission. Arguably, he’s based on the poet Simonides, of whose poem about Perseus and Danae we still have a fragment.

9.) So Acrisius attacks Perseus and company, and someone dies – that’s to remind us that this is serious. The film never lets a chance to kill someone go by without a sacrificial lamb. Acrisius loses his hand and drips black blood, with both his hand and the blood turning into Giant Scorpions.

The sliver of justification for all this is a single line in, I think, Apollodorus, who notes that, as Perseus flew over the Libyan desert, the blood that fell on the sand gave birth to snakes, scorpions, and other poisonous creatures. It was a reference to the snakes associated with Medusa and her ‘poisonous" gaze, and probably reflected a folk belief. In the 1981 film it was, indeed, the blood from Medusa’s head that gave birth to scorpions (Cross knew his myths). They became giant scorpions that Perseus and his men fought because Harryhausen liked animating big arthropods – he gave us a giant crab in The Mysterious Island, and it wporked there, so why not? This time it’s Acrisius blood, instead, apparently the result of Hades’ sooty magic breath, but so what? It makes for great CGI, and we get more sacrificial lambs out of it. Its connection with any real myth is tendril-thin at best. But even that is blown out of the water when the fight is stopped by Djinn.

10.) Djinn? Djinn are fire beings in Arabic cosmology (not just mythology. Djinn show up not only in The Arabian Nights, they’re explicitly mentioned in the Koran). That’s why Aladdin’s can live in a lamp. But these Djinn seem to be something altogether different. Although they use blue fire that emanates from a complex wand (they’re ripping off Gandalf’s staff from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings), there Djinn seem to be people who lose parts and replace them with rock, or something, and are magicians to boot. Classical Djinn these aren’t. We’ve exvidently started ripping off Nick Chopper as the Tin Woodsman from The Wizard of Oz

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Yeah, tell me about it. babbles

And what happened to my “not”? I typed that she was NOT cursed with agelessness.

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Clash of the Stupid was fun. I saw it in 2D, hearing 3D sucked donkey balls. I didn’t expect it to make sense, and it didn’t. It was something of an atheist rant, but that was okay too.

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11.) So the Djinn tame the giant scorpions and put howdahs n them. Evidently they adapt quickly to new situations, because you figure Acrisius couldn’t have been bleeding all that long before the came there.

I’m sorry – this is just dumb.

:mad:
12.) Perseus is given the gift of a Magic Sword, which he refuses. Okay, this is really dumb, too.

:mad:

On the other hand, I have to applaud the film’s limited use of magic gifts. In the :canonical" myth, Perseus gets magic flying slippers (that enable him to get everywhere), a magic helmet of invisibility, a his magic bag, the kibisis, his sword, the harpe, and, in late versions, a magic shield. Then he gets magical help from Athena and from Hermes. That really is a bit much. A lot of writers have compared Perseus to 007, getting all those gifts like Bond does from Q*. My suspicion is that we have here a concatentation of *all * the gifts he gets in different versions of the myth, told by different bards in different poems. They’re all so good, they didn’t want to leave any out of the story. But if Perseus gets all of them, then he’s not really all that heroic, is he? :slight_smile:

If you had to limit it to one item, the sword is a good choice – it’s Perseus’ characteristic weapon. The classic harpe is curved, like a sickle, of which much has been made 0including by me). In later depictions the harpe becomes a sort of double sword, a straight blade with a sort of billhook attached. :

As far as I know, no one has ever used this in any dramatizarion of Perseus. harpe seems to be relasted to Semitic chereb, which just means “sword”, and I siuspect to the sikh kirpan. But we’re getting away from things.

  • This Perseus gets things from James Bond, too – in particular Gemma Atherton (Io) and Mads Mikkelson (Draco), both of whom appeared in the 2006 Bond film [B[Casino Royale**.

13.) Of course, Perseus couldn’t use the Flying Slippers, anyway. Not only would it look dumb, but he needs to get to the island where Medusa is with his companions – you need sacrificial lambs. Giving him Pegasus isn’t exactly canonical (Pegasus comes into the story by being born from Medusa’s neck after her head is cut off. Gross, but attested to by plenty of ancient artwork.), but even in the classical world people were trying to put Perseus on Pegasus’ back. There’s ancient art showing his decapitating Medusa from the back of a horse. Ovid, in one of his Amatory poems (but not the Metamorphoses) gas Perseus riding Pegasus. And one of the first operas ever composed has Perseus on Pegsus. So Harryhausen was in good company when he put Perseus on the flying horse. :slight_smile:

Bu the way, there’s no canonical color for Pegasus, so black is fine. But, just for the record, Bellerophon is the hero best known for riding Pegsus, especially when he fights the Chimera.
14.) So they find the “Stygian Witches”. I actually like them more in this version. In the 1981 film they look too much like the Three Weird Sisters from Roman Polanski’s version of Macbeth. The more grotesque, the better, I say. They should’ve looked even more grotesque.

Actually, these are the Graeae or the Phorkydes. They’re the sisters of the Gorgons, children of Phrkys (the Old Man of the Sea) and Ketos, the Sea Monster – the very same one Andromeda gets sacrificed to, here called the Kraken.

Exactly why they’re in the myth is confusing. They tell Perseus the way to go to the Nymphs, who give him the sword, sandals, shield, etc. Or else they tell him the way to the Gorgons. In both versions of CotT, though, they tell him that he can defeat the Kraken by using Medusa’s head to petrify him. Quite a change.

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All right, I’ll join this one. I’m mostly just pissed off at the waste of money/time and the fact that the advertisements made it look so lovely.

Good points:

I liked the intro when they were talking about the elder gods, the Titans, the 3D was really effective and I was almost salivating, thinking about the rest of the awesome movie with Titans in it. I mostly went to see it because I thought it was about Titans, whom I’ve heard very little about, even though I like reading classics. Yeah, I didn’t watch the first movie.

I liked the cloud floor of Mt Olympus.

Bad points:

Medusa making faces like she broke a nail. Bloody Medusa.

Perseus with almost shaved head. How’s he going to maintain that without clippers? Maybe it’s some godlike quality.

Perseus disdaining gifts of gods (but is perfectly okay with the godlike fighting ability, never chooses pacifist route).

Black pegasus. Maybe they thought the white ones were too girly.

Killing off Andromeda in the first scene. Cynical me thinks it was because she was fat. Hades probably likes his girls skeletal.

Kraken being there at all, and kraken tentacles making sword-like wooshing noises when flailed over Argos.

Hades being jealous and trying to usurp Zeus? WTF?

Io? Bloody Io? What the fuck?

Djinn??? (Have already discussed this with CalMeacham in other thread.) And scorpions that had no real reason to be there!

Bottom line for me – I was so excited to see epic battles between elder gods and ended up with Perseus winging his way on a *black *pegasus with his arm around an unexplained Io. I am NOT happy.

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http://www.complexactions.com/archive/078.shtml

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Some people misstated Hades: In some verison he chose the land of the dead, in others he lost out ot the others for the “good” positions. Either way, he is never really cruel or particularly kind about it. In fact, he didn;'t really do anything, as there wasn’t much to do. He jsut hung around and got out on vacation every chance he got, and was known for not causing trouble to anyone. He was pretty flexible about brining people back to life, although the guys trying to bring people back to life usually screwed it up. That said, he wasn’t bland or emotionless; he just wasn’t around and didn’t interact with people very much.

This isn’t the first time people have gotten Hades crossed up with other gods, too. Christianity actually didn’t cross them up too much until Hollywood, but people have crossed him up with other local pantheons in the ancient world. Dunno why.

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As I mentioned inn the other thread, they used the Hades-wants-to-take-over-from-Zeus idea in Disney’s version of Hercules, too. And it’s in the recent Percy Jackson book and movie, as well.

But it’s not in Greek myth. Modern storytellers seem to need this idea of good guy vs bad guy dynamic for their works. Heck, Marvel comics did the same thing, pitting Loki against Thor since the 1960s. it wasn’t any truer there, either.

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Not only do they need good guy vs. bad guy, but they seem to want to wedge Greek mythos into the mold of Christian myth.

I mean think about it, isn’t the whole “Hades lives in the underworld, resents Zeus, and wants to take his throne” suspiciously similar to the Lucifer/God dynamic? Of course the comparison is ill-conceived because the Greek concept of the Underworld is nothing like the Christian concept of Hell, but it seems like that’s the angle they are going for.

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This isn’t helped by some translations of the Christian Bible replacing the word “Hell” with “Hades”.

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That’s what I was going to say; it’s an explanation I’ve heard before. There’s a strong tendency in our Christianity-saturated culture to try to turn every myth and write every fantasy story as a variation on God versus Satan. The Greek God’s * power structure, a bunch of squabbling self indulgent aristocrats under the thumb of the biggest and baddest God isn’t much like the preconceptions of people who think in terms of the “Good Sky God versus the Evil Underworld God”.

I do wonder if it is due to preconceptions on the part of the writers, or a deliberate attempt to pander to the audience, though.

  • Few if any of whom qualify as “good”, especially by modern standards.
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Except in the Percy Jackson story:

It wasn’t Hades at all, it was Chronos who was attempting to stir shit up between the gods. Hades had been framed.

Unless of course they changed the movie from the book, I don’t know as I haven’t seen the film.

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Hades is still framed in the book, although not in quite the same way. My point was that it was presented (in the movie pretty dramatically) at the start as Hades vs. Zeus.

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I liked bits of it. I thought it was interesting the way they tried to have the fate of the world in the balance.

Though, they never explained how or why Zeus got better.

The Jinn were pretty pointless. I expected one to kill Medusa and explain that they are already stone or that they aren’t technically living men or something.

I HATED the making Hades a stand in for Satan bit. My impression over the years (though I am a bit rusty on my mythology) was that being gloomy and somber himself, Hades liked the underworld.

Yog Sothoth I also thought the old soldier looked like the Rock’s dad.

Re The Buzz Cut

I didn’t find it that anachronous. IIRC One of the Roman emperors ( I know, Rome wouldn’t rise for centuries yet. But AFAIK there were no great advances in haircutting technology in that time) dictated that all legionares would have a crew cut. It prevented hair getting into your eyes, or enemies grabbing your hair. If the Romans could maintain a crew cut, I assume the Greeks could as well.