Giant scorpions: Serious business.
Apr. 14th, 2010 11:55 amSo, how 'bout that Clash of the Titans? This is more of a rant than a regular review, so I’ll go on a while. Long story short, I’d rate this a two-and-a-half stars, kind of like Terminator: Salvation. While it’s not openly insulting the audience, it’s really messy and if anyone particularly cared how it turned out, it’s not too evident. There’s a lot of problems, but let’s start with the plot.
In the world of Titans, humanity has decided to get Nietzsche on the gods’ celestial asses. One character even led a siege on Mount Olympus. Now, that’s a really cool idea. It’s a very potent metaphor, but at the same time it’s nowhere near Garth Ennis’s bullshit, so you don’t have to water it down like a Phillip Pullman story. You can use the gods as a metaphor for anything, from the natural order of things to the upper class to the Patriarchy to Scientologists to, yes, even the God. All you have to do is decide what you’re saying with this metaphor, maybe who's right and who's wrong for instance? Clash never decides that. It’s such an intriguing idea, I don’t know how it ended up in this movie. It's like Samuel L. Jackson in the Star Wars prequels. Hey, what's a cool guy like you doing in a story like this?*
( Waiter, there’s too much Christianity in my soup. )
*In fact, the last time I saw such a good metaphor was Deadgirl, where the filmmakers take the idea of misogyny to its logical conclusion, where you’re just fucking a corpse in a basement somewhere. Of course, then it ends up not being so much pro-feminist as anti-misogyny, as there’s only one woman in the movie who isn’t naked and dead, and she’s the lusted-after girlfriend of the psycho jock. Gee, never seen that character before. And instead of really delving into the "rape culture," for lack of a better term, they just have the characters take one look at a tied-up zombie girl and say “Hey, let’s keep her as a sex slave!” Man, that movie was shit. Don't know why I thought about it while I was reviewing Clash of the Titans.
In the world of Titans, humanity has decided to get Nietzsche on the gods’ celestial asses. One character even led a siege on Mount Olympus. Now, that’s a really cool idea. It’s a very potent metaphor, but at the same time it’s nowhere near Garth Ennis’s bullshit, so you don’t have to water it down like a Phillip Pullman story. You can use the gods as a metaphor for anything, from the natural order of things to the upper class to the Patriarchy to Scientologists to, yes, even the God. All you have to do is decide what you’re saying with this metaphor, maybe who's right and who's wrong for instance? Clash never decides that. It’s such an intriguing idea, I don’t know how it ended up in this movie. It's like Samuel L. Jackson in the Star Wars prequels. Hey, what's a cool guy like you doing in a story like this?*
*In fact, the last time I saw such a good metaphor was Deadgirl, where the filmmakers take the idea of misogyny to its logical conclusion, where you’re just fucking a corpse in a basement somewhere. Of course, then it ends up not being so much pro-feminist as anti-misogyny, as there’s only one woman in the movie who isn’t naked and dead, and she’s the lusted-after girlfriend of the psycho jock. Gee, never seen that character before. And instead of really delving into the "rape culture," for lack of a better term, they just have the characters take one look at a tied-up zombie girl and say “Hey, let’s keep her as a sex slave!” Man, that movie was shit. Don't know why I thought about it while I was reviewing Clash of the Titans.