Jamie
Clickity Clash of the Titans, baby. Never seen the original and we weren’t about to change that now. We already had to watch a couple films this week and so there is only so much homework we can take… like remember when we did those based-on-a-book cycles? That’s crazy. We got lives, jobs, responsibilities. Responsibilities like a multimedia empire to take care of. So we met up at my house, put on our big boy pants, put our hats on backwards, curled up the cuffs on our pants up past our calves, hiked up our tubes socks to cover our well-toned calves, put on our birkenstocks to pair with our tube socks, unbuttoned exactly two buttons on our casual short sleeved dress shirts, make sure we aren’t wearing our typical deep-v undershirt in order to maintain modesty, put on a single fingerless glove, put a second hat on top of our original hat, tightened our ascots, and watched Clash of the Titans as it should be watched… together… as a fambly… dressed like monsters.
The recap, Perseus is just a demigod looking to live a quiet life as a fisherman. Fat chance! That’s because everyone is going around being like “stupid gods, we don’t even like you,” and the gods are none to happy about it. His family is killed in one of these clashes between man and god and he is taken to Argos. The King and Queen of Argos are all like “whatevs, sure we got totally owned by the gods, but like… doubt it’ll happen again.” Wrong! Hades is right there to kill the queen and threaten to destroy the city with the Kraken unless the princess is sacrificed. Suddenly they are really happy to have Persues around. They send him on a quest to ask some gross witches what they need to kill a Kraken. On this quest they have all kinds of kooky adventures. They fight some big ol’ scorpions, Zeus tries to give Perseus a sword but he’s like “you’re not my real dad!”, and some Djinn come along and agree to help them. When they get to the witches they are indeed real gross, but also they quickly force them to reveal the one thing that can kill a Kraken: Medusa’s gross head. Perseus pretty easily grabs dat head, but pretty much everyone else dies. He uses Pegasus to fly back to Argos where the princess is about to be thrown into the Kraken’s maw. But Perseus is like “check this out,” and shows the Kraken the gross Medusa head and it’s so gross that the Kraken dies. Perseus wins. THE END.
I actually dug this movie. It comes from a time when CGI heavy films were being made with love and care for a massive amount of money rather than now when they are shot out by a CGI cannon for a massive amount of money. So other than a couple dodgy moments (looking at you, giant scorpions) I thought this film looked quite good. It also is helped by being entrenched in classic mythology without a need to deviate too far from the given route. So the story is good. Classic hero’s quest. I can see why the film got a sequel. It made a bunch of money and I could see there being a solid fanbase… like me… I am the fanbase. It made me want to go back and watch the original film, even, just to see if it had a similar classic mythology vibe. But again… responsibilities etc. etc. etc.
Hot Take Clam Bake! Perseus definitely gets with Andromeda, right? She is lauded as the greatest beauty in all the land (just don’t say she’s more beautiful than the gods). She offers Perseus the opportunity to be king. They have been brought closer by an intense tragedy and loss of like… everyone they know. They are getting it. I don’t care that Io is like “uh, I’m also immortal so basically I understand you.” Understand shmand. Put it in the bank. Five seconds after the movie ends Perseus stops and is like “wait a second, I’m not sure I actually want to be a fisherman all that much,” and heads off to have all his wildest dreams come true. Hot Take Temperature: Cool ocean breeze on the cliffs of Argos.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Clash of the Titans? More like Cash Grab of a Slight Film … sure, a little overwrought maybe. Like this movie! Let’s go!
This film is kind of good. I’m actually quite surprised to say that. It seems to have an interesting myth based story. Some of the CGI still holds up decently (a huge surprise). And the cast is chockablock with big stars looking silly in costumes.
It stumbles every so often though. The scorpions? Look like garbage.
Medusa? Real real real garbage looking.
I loved the design of the Djinn, but even that was a little bit of a step too far at times. Starts to really lean into the fantasy elements instead of the mythological elements. Is it weird that I’m like “medusa, giants, gods, etc. that’s fine” but then when a whole mess of Djinn show up it felt like a mixed metaphor? Like they were pulling in some other cultures mythology and muddling things unnecessarily. Perhaps Djinns did exist in ancient Greek myths. Maybe I should look that up.
Nope, from what I can tell Djinns are pretty exclusive to Islamic beliefs, all the way to being firmly established only after the establishment of Islam as a religion even. They existed prior, but it seems rather unlikely that they would have been involved with the Greek mythological figures in any meaningful way.
But still, I was girding myself for a real Sam Worthington (more like Wooden-ton am I right?) performance, but he was a genuine star in this and the film worked quite well I thought.
Sadly I didn’t watch the original, although I wish I had because there is some indication that some of Wrath maybe comes from the back half of that film, which could have made me appreciate that one more.
Obviously a Setting as a Character (Where?) for Ancient Greece, we could replace Meet the Spartans on the map if we wanted to. I kind of love the idea of MacGuffin (Why?) being Medusa’s head, but they also know what it does and why they are getting it so not really. I think this is very much closest to Good.
Read about the three camera sitcom that fell between the two films in the Quiz, Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 