Sin #50: Crash of the Titans

Something happened during the screening of Louis Leterrier’s “Clash of the Titans”; as I was watching it I violently realized how different audiences were back in 1981, when the original premiered. The new movie shifts motivations and personalities in order to satisfy the hunger for overblown special effects and in the process sacrifices the humor, adventure and romance that made the original so entertaining and effective.

Let’s begin with Perseus, the hero in both versions. In the 1981 version he was played by Harry Hamlin as a stiff and awkward young man who doesn’t realize he is actually the son of Zeus and is caught in a journey where he falls in love with the princess Andromeda, about to be sacrificed to the Gods. It’s his love for her that makes him want to defeat the Kraken, a mythical creature, and save her.

In the 2010 version he is played by Sam Worthington, in a lazy performance that isn’t too far off from his Jake Sully in “Avatar” (he even gets to keep his modern haircut). In this movie he doesn’t even fall in love with the princess, his motivations for defeating the Kraken are purely egotistical as he seeks revenge against Hades, who was responsible for his family’s demise. The movie is so poorly written that there really is no emotional connection whatsoever.

Now, about the gods themselves; in the 1981 version there were a lot of scenes featuring Zeus, Thetis, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Athena and others. There really was a sense of true scheming and discussion around the council, but that Zeus ruled justly and firmly. In the 2010 version we barely get to see the council at all and virtually nobody has any dialogue except for Zeus and Hades (an unnecessary additional villain for the remake); there’s no sense of a dynamic within the council, it’s all about Zeus. In the first movie he was played gracefully by the great Shakespearean actor Lawrence Olivier and in the remake he’s played by Liam Neeson in an over-the-top performance that drifts between seriousness and campiness on equal measures. His Zeus is a confused deity who can’t decide if he wants to kill the humans or save them, if he loves his son or despises him. The movie also creates a character named Lo who is Perseus’s guardian but doesn’t really contribute anything to the plot (there’s a brief flirtation between them that never pays off).

The special effects in the new version are better than the previous one but still there’s a sense of wonder and joy that is missing. While the original combined stop-motion and rear projection to create the menacing creatures, the new one overuses mediocre CGI. The sequence of Medusa is a thousand times more suspenseful in the 1981 version even though Medusa was basically a clay doll, but the way the filmmakers approached the design of her layer made it frightening. The new one feels like a dumb action sequences that lacks rhythm and falls flat. The same can be said about the Kraken who is too similar in design to the creature in “Cloverfield”; he never goes beyond an obvious effect.

“Clash of the Titans”, the remake, is a dumb action picture with bad performances and a cheesy script that turns the mythical journey into a bore. It’s proof that Hollywood likes to dumb down their blockbusters for audiences with short attention span. While special effects extravaganzas can be involving (like with the “Lord of the Rings”), most of the new films lack heart and soul; that’s why “Clash of the Titans” of 1981 is better in the areas that actually count.