What’s not to like about this movie? The sight of Zeus upon Mount Olympus, the battle between the gods and humans, and who can forget about the Kraken – the worst thing ever seen by mankind. I think the question should read is what is to like about this movie?
Director Louis Leterrier wants his movie to be a serious action-adventure, an epic with mythic resonance; if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have cribbed so much from “The Lord of the Rings” movies. But in striving for a combination of grit and grandeur, Leterrier misses a chance to make the kind of camp classic that could have endured for generations. Instead, it’s a muddled disappointment.
In Clash of the Titans, the humans declare war on the Greek gods by not worshiping them and the gods respond by releasing a gargantuan creature known as the Kraken.
The main character Perseus is a demigod (half god, half human) offspring of Zeus and the earthly queen Danaë. Perseus is played by Avatar star Sam Worthington. Like Sully, Perseus falls for a woman on the other side of the human/nonhuman divide: Instead of a Na’vi princess, his love object is the demi-goddess Io (Gemma Arterton). There’s even a moment in both movies when Worthington must leap from the back of one winged beast onto the back of another. Avatar has taken a lot of heat for being weak on story and overly reliant on visual effects, but compared with this witless, chaotic mess of a movie, James Cameron’s epic looks worthy of the ancient Greek authors—Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer—who first told Perseus’ tale.
As a newborn, Perseus is hurled into the sea by his father, Acrisius (Jason Flemyng), who disbelieves his wife’s claim that she was impregnated by Zeus. The baby is discovered by a kind fisherman played by Pete Postlethwaite, who packs a memorable performance into a tiny wedge of screen time. After a series of misfortunes, Perseus finds himself conscripted to save the city of Argos from an assault by the gods, who have been angered by the growing hubris of mortals.
It’s being released in 3-D but wasn’t conceived that way, and the result is a murky image that’s often far too dark for the action onscreen and which features little if any three-dimensional awesomeness one would expect from an “epic adventure” such as this. Clash was predictable, slow-moving and uneventful. The only reason I would watch this movie again is to hear Liam Neeson say the greatest three words of the movie…“Release the Kraken!”
