It’s always a bad sign when a movie starts with a lame voice-over (Transformers, anyone?). It’s even worse when the film is described as a cinematic “game-changer” – the same term used to tout Avatar – for the devastating failure of its conversion to 3D format after being filmed as a convention 2D movie. But even in two classic dimensions, there is plenty here to gripe about.
Like a monument to wasted opportunities and squandered talent, Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans runs roughshod over everything to which it owes its existence, sparing indignity neither to the enduring splendor of Greek mythology nor to its own namesake, Desmond Davis’s 1981 film adaptation of the Greek myth of Perseus.
Forget the love story between Perseus (Sam Worthington) and Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos): in this version, he has a thing for his guardian angel Io (Gemma Arterton) and wants to save Andromeda only to spite Hades (Ralph Fiennes), because the god of the dead killed Perseus’s adoptive family and is only vulnerable if the kraken is dispatched.
The kraken is supposed to eat Andromeda, so killing it entails not allowing her to be eaten. And that is literally all the motivation Perseus has for saving her in what constitutes the film’s central story arc.
Leterrier and company want us to care about Perseus’s identity issues as a demigod caught between mankind and his father, Zeus (Liam Neeson), and about his rage at the deities he holds collectively responsible for his murdered family.
But Worthington, who performs to that increasingly familiar, overwhelmingly mediocre standard on display in Avatar and Terminator Salvation, lacks the charisma to engage us emotionally – certainly with a script like this one – so for almost two hours we are treated to his petulance and angst as he rails against Olympus and insists to his mortal comrades-in-arms that he is discharging his duties “as a man,” not a half-god.
From that first phrase of narration to the post-kraken-battle sigh of relief (either that our hero survived unscathed despite a quickly forgotten prophecy guaranteeing his doom or just that it’s finally time to go home), there is not one scintilla of causality or logic to the proceedings, just a bunch of throwaway expository dialogue that strings action set-pieces along the plot like shish kebab.
Take, for example, a scene in which Perseus and his band pursue an invincible warrior for no other reason than seemingly to test his invincibility; they injure him, and his blood sprouts a colony of giant, murderous scorpions who savagely attack our heroes only to be telepathically subdued by a band of inhuman djinn (who, incidentally, did not exist in Greek mythology) and then inexplicably serve as beasts of burden for the rest of the film.
Admittedly, they are some fairly impressive action set-pieces, engaging even if only as a kind of soulless spectacle – you won’t want to look away but you won’t for a second care what happens – that will be familiar to anyone who sat through Transformers.
However, much of the CGI is surprisingly low-quality, particularly where Medusa is involved; thankfully, Perseus’s winged steed Pegasus and the rather impressive kraken – a match for anything in Avatar, at least in two dimensions – got top-tier treatment.
With the kind of cast it attracted, Clash of the Titans ought to be able to simply rest on its laurels as an ensemble film, but alas, it is not to be. Liam Neeson as the king of the gods somehow musters less stern authority than he did as a desperate mortal father in Taken; Ralph Fiennes as Hades just feels like he is parodying his Potterverse altar ego, Voldemort, with a vague nod to Miranda Richardson’s whisper-voiced Queen Mab, the antagonist in Merlin.
Stir in some mediocre bit parts, including Liam Cunningham as a warrior who feels like a casting substitute for Bernard Hill (LOTR’s King Theoden) and an embarrassingly bad cameo by Polly Walker as Queen Cassiopeia, and it seems the only person who emerges from it all unscathed is Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre) as warrior chief Draco.
For all its many faults, Clash of the Titans is not a complete train wreck. The tragedy here is the disservice done to the grandeur of the material. We get tantalizing glimpses of Olympus and the other gods (Poseidon, one of the “big three,” has exactly one line of dialogue), but no more.
“Damn the gods,” as the trailers have been urging, is right. Clash of the Titans is rooted firmly in mortal anti-authoritarianism, even at the expense of the traditional romantic element, and it simply does not care to investigate the might or the machinations of Olympus when there are giant scorpions to point the camera at.