Welcome to ‘Movie Meh…’, a new segment where I rant about hyped up movies which are just plain…meh.
Tonight’s Meh is….Clash of the Titans.
Ohh! Monsters and fighting! It's got it all, it has!
A few nights ago, I was watching a DVD of the 2010 re-make of ‘Clash of the Titans’. I didn’t go into it expecting a timeless classic, or indeed anything more than a Popcorn-movie, which in itself is fine when you are in the mood for it. The original 1981 version was just a fantasy epic and was little more than a Popcorn-movie itself (from what I can remember). However something seriously irked me about this 2010 production, which I’ve only just managed to put my finger on now.
Clash of the Titans (2010) had all the potential of be a great, and enjoyable swords and sorcery epic. But it never lived up to it, and whats more it always felt like that potential was there. That’s whats annoying about this film for me. It could have been a very excellent, but was ruined by some very easy to fix bugs, which in the end made the movie feel….’meh’.
What ‘bugs’ you ask? First off, the beginning of the movie is one. We are introduced to Persius (Sam Worthington) as an abandoned baby rescued from the ocean by a fishing family.
In that moment, we are introduced to Io (Gemma Arterton) who then utters the boy’s name from a distant beach for some reason (more about her later). This sequence alone feels odd, but more so it feels very ‘fake’. I know what you’re thinking, it’s a movie, it’s supposed to be fake, but the suspension of disbelief needed to give the story any power isn’t here. You can see here that Arterton is just standing in a sound room, uttering her line in a dry monotone with a very obvious blue-screen background behind her. It’s just lazy and gives a very bad impression for the rest of the film.
Suddenly we flash forward a couple of years to Persius’ boyhood, where he is informed by his adoptive father that he loves him as his own….point being, that 5 seconds later we flash forward another 15 years to where Persius’ family are killed by the wrath of the gods. Damn…that was needlessly fast… The beginning is just a mess. I get that their trying to fit whole load of plot in there, but in some cases, less is more.
Con-current to Persius’ plot is that of the Gods of Olympus. They are pissed, because the mortal world no longer seems to give a damn about them. Neither would I frankly, they seem to be mostly a club of Emo superbeings, who are more concerned with being loved by the masses (and have sex with them) than actually getting on with the business of being gods… Either way, they are now extra pissed, because the King and Queen of Argos have dared to compare the beauty of their daughter Andromeda to a goddess.
Really? There are so many other things you could be pissed about, and you go for that? Alright then.
I speak with a BBC accent! And therefore, am all mystical and Greek.
As punishment, they’re going to send a PS2 end-boss known as the Kraken over to level the city. Lovely.
Thus a ‘war’ ensues, where the forces of Argos venture out to find a way to protect themselves from the wrath of the Gods. Persius is imprisoned for refusing to fight, where he is met by Io, who reveals everything and convinces him to join up with Argos’s best to quest against the god’s monsters. Right here, I’m going to have to talk about Io, or more specifically, Gemma Arterton.
I really do have issues with this actress. I’ve only just seen her in another Movie Meh called Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, where she nearly plays the same character. She speaks with this very odd BBC monotone voice, and seems to have less emotional range than crushed milk-carton! Whats more, in this film and the Disney video-game cash-in, her character goes for this ‘all-knowing’ mystic character. It just doesn’t work! I don’t for a second believe that she’s some kind of mystic! If she even tried to act, she might pull it off, but I always get the feeling that she’s just reading her lines. For a lot of Clash of the Titans…she is present. She’s just there. She follows Persius’ group while on their quest, and is simply there…especially when the plot requires it. I feel that she is a major fault in this film.
Another issue, making this movie so ‘meh’, are the effects. They are surprisingly bad for a 2010 film. It’s expected that most action films employ 3D computer graphics to build up scenes. But at least an effort is made to make those effects somewhat believable. The below-par CGI is made clear by the attack of the Kraken near the end of the film. It’s big, it’s bad, it kills a lot of people, but you don’t seem to care because it plays like an end boss in a Final Fantasy game.
Ahh! The Kraken! Stock up on Pheonix Downs!
I just couldn’t feel it. He’s supposed to be the main threat of the story, and he just doesn’t work. The city he destroys is clearly CGI, as are the people he kills, and I just couldn’t care less. That in the end is what makes this movee so ‘meh’. I don’t care. Even in a poorly made kids show, I may give a tiny amount of a damn…and here, in a big-budget hollywood epic…I can’t care. The bad guys are unipressive. The good guys are boring or Gemma Arterton. I cant stay engaged here.
It built itself up as an epic movie..and just went…meh. And that is a ‘Movie Meh’.
-Rawr.
You just want me for my body!!
Oooh. PS.
Small nitpick. In the original Greek legend, Andromeda was also offered to be sacrificed to a sea monster (much like the Kraken in this movie). However, according to that legend she was stripped naked first (since monsters don’t like the taste of clothes I guess). In Clash of the Titans she was chained up for sacrifice, but fully clothed. I know…they’re weren’t going to have full-frontal (or even partial) nudity in a film like this, but it is kind of disappointing since nudity was always a major perk in Greek sagas. Oh well…
