Review: Clash Of The Titans

Ladies and gentlemen, the strapping thighs of Mads Mikkelsen and Sam Worthington.

Clash Of The Titans
Directed by: Louis Leterrier
Starring: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Mads Mikkelsen
Distributed by: Roadshow

This oddly old-fashioned sword-and-sandal action fantasy is a hack movie in every way, but it does offer disposable fun for you and your friends to laugh about in the pub afterwards. It manages to be crappier than the 1981 film upon which it’s based, and almost every moment feels cribbed from another movie. Spotting these as they arise is a fun game.

The plot is basically the Greek mythological story of how the demi-god hero Perseus (Sam Worthington) killed Medusa and rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea monster, although Clash Of The Titans manages to fuck most of it up. For a start, there are no Titans anywhere in the film; if anything, it depicts a clash between brother-gods Zeus (Liam Neeson), ruler of the heavens, and Hades (Ralph Fiennes), ruler of the underworld.

If I go into the many stupid ways in which Clash Of The Titans departs from the actual myth, I will get mad like the time I saw Troy and ranted that it “wasn’t at all like The Iliad!” But just for starters: in the Greek myth Perseus’s mum Danaë is not the wife but the daughter of King Acrisius (Jason Flemyng); and Zeus does not impregnate Danaë by disguising himself as Acrisius (as in the film), but in the form of a shower of gold.

Worst of all, the film imports a character from another myth altogether: Io (Gemma Arterton). Io was a nymph seduced by Zeus and transformed into a heifer to hide her from Zeus’s jealous wife Hera. Whereas in Clash Of The Titans, Io is a guardian and unnecessary love interest for Perseus.

Hades (Ralph Fiennes) totally reminded me of John Travolta in Battlefield Earth.

However, Io does get the most unintentionally funny line in the entire, awful script, which I won’t spoil here. Shat out and thrown at a wall by four hacks, the script constantly inspires questions such as: “Who’s that guy?” “What nationality are they meant to be?” “How did we get so quickly from that forest to that desert?” and “How many of those giant crabs are there, anyway?”

Idiotically, the film also seems bent on sketching some kind of guerrilla war between gods and humans in which Perseus becomes entangled. Thus, Sam Worthington gets to insist repeatedly, in his jarring Australian accent, that he’s a MAN and he’ll do this the human way. He doesn’t want your goddamn help, Dad. No! He won’t use your stupid magic sword!

The director, Leterrier, is a Frenchman whom I’ve (perhaps unfairly) dismissed as a studio yes-man, given that his few Hollywood credits include Transporter 2 and the 2008 reboot of The Incredible Hulk. But if I were him, I’d be rather angry at the shoddy way his film has been hurriedly butchered into 3D to capitalise on the successes of Avatar and Alice In Wonderland.

“You know, everybody is an overnight expert,” Avatar director James Cameron recently told USA Today. “They ignore the fact that we natively authored the film in 3D, and decide that what we accomplished in several years of production could be done in an eight week [post-production 3D] conversion with Clash of the Titans.”

I felt uneasy when watching Clash Of The Titans in 3D. At first I wondered whether the weird halo effect around the edges of figures was meant to differentiate between gods and humans, or whether the distracting blurriness at the edges of the screen indicated something wrong with my glasses.

Nup; it’s just badly done 3D – or as Cameron calls it, “2.8D”. And it doesn’t even enhance the action setpieces. Do not bother shelling out to watch this movie in 3D.

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