Giant scorpions: Serious business.
Apr. 14th, 2010 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficSo, 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?*
See, for some reason, the filmmakers decided to make Zeus into God and Hades into Satan (I guess that would make Perseus Jesus. How original, the hero is a Christ figure). The characters talk about how much Zeus loves humanity so many times that you could turn it into a drinking game. He loves humanity so much that it takes him a whole five seconds to listen to the evil Hades and decide to wreck humanity’s shit. But see, Hades wants to take over and live on humanity’s fear instead of worship. Brrrr, we’d live in fear of Hades instead of living in fear of Zeus siccing Hades on us! I really don’t see much of a difference, we’d just be cutting out the middleman. Probably save us a bundle on sacrifices.
Look, Hollywood, if you want to make a movie about Christian mythology, make a movie about Christian mythology. Do an epic movie about David killing Goliath and then some sequels about his fail as King David, that would get butts in seats. But don’t just arbitrarily turn every other culture in a fanfic of the Bible. It’s boring. Here, it’s damning. In a movie that could’ve been about laying siege to Mount Olympus, all our hero does is help out in an internal power struggle. It’s like if in a WW2 movie, a crack commando unit set out to assassinate Hitler and ended up helping him stop a coup by Gobbells.
And, really weirdly, they changed the story of Perseus so Zeus (the nice guy who Perseus is trying to keep in power) is less sympathetic! Instead of romancing some guy’s daughter, he rapes someone’s wife as punishment for the guy, producing Perseus. Then later, he turns the guy into a monster. Why didn't you do that in the first place, you creepy molester? Finally, there’s this seriously odd ending where Perseus and Zeus kinda reconcile? It’s like a beer commercial. I challenge you not to think “Hey, dad, remember that time you raped my mom?” throughout this scene.
Anyway, the rest of the story hews mostly to the original movie. A princess is going to be sacrificed to the Kraken, and our man Perseus goes on a quest to save her (note: they screw this up), encountering most of the same creatures Harry Hamlin did except for Bubo, because this is a grown-up movie for grown-ups, and grown-ups don’t laugh. The problem is, they take it really seriously, to the point where the movie is just grim and humorless. I think a total of one person smiles in this movie, and it’s because he’s getting killed by Medusa.
Yet at the same time, it’s really silly. The characters are all redshirts aside from Perseus, and he’s Sam Worthington. No offense, but the guy just isn’t that charismatic. Guys like Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, they seemed interesting no matter who they were playing. You’d like to get a beer with them. Worthington just looks like a badass, which admittedly is more than a lot of American actors can pull off (c.f. the Captain America casting process), but he’s all glowering rage and man-pain. You get the feeling that if you got a beer with him, he’d spend the entire night staring at the wall, trying to intimidate it with his thousand-yard stare.
Seriously, does his jaw ever unclench?
Now, they could’ve gone in two equally different directions. One, they could’ve tried really hard to make it an A-movie. Really explored the idea of mankind rebelling against the gods, treated it seriously, maybe even made it with an R-rating. Something like The Bourne Identity in tone and atmosphere.
OR! They could’ve done it with a light touch, and focused on making it a fun ride. You know, like Iron Man, Star Trek, Hellboy, or The Mummy, where the situations are serious, but they’re not taken too seriously. Given that it’s a summer action movie from the director of The Transporter and the logline is “Greek superhero takes on giant monsters to save princess from the biggest monster,” I think this is probably the direction they should’ve gone. At least they’d be able to pull it off.
I don’t have anything against grim and gritty movies, but the darkness has to fit the subject matter. Terminator 2 and The Dark Knight are really dark movies, but they deal with some really dark shit. I have no idea why a movie about fighting giant scorpions has to be so depressing. The monsters here are so freaky that I think they’d give most kids nightmares. The movie is so gory and grotesque, yet at the same time lacking any thematic concepts that demand that freakiness. It’s like a Spawn comic.
“Mommy, Mommy, I wanna see that movie with the monsters JESUS CHRIST, I WANNA GO HOME!”
Going back to what I said about not being a serious movie, this movie plays more like a storyboard than a film. You know how in Star Wars, there were these long scenes where Luke had conversations and revealed his character? You got to know him, his dreams, his frustrations, and so you had an emotional connection to him when the action started. There’s none of that in Clash. The scenes flip by like setpieces in a Bourne movie, giving you just enough to know what’s going on.
Boom-here’s Perseus-Boom-here’s his family-boom-they’re dead now-boom-now he’s meeting the princess-boom-she’s in danger, he has to rescue her-boom-he’s given a group of men to help him-boom-they’re dead now too-boom-he won’t accept the gods’ help-boom-oh wait, I guess he will-boom-he killed the Kraken!-boom-stay tuned next week for more wild adventures!
So as you might’ve surmised, Perseus’s goal is to save the princess, but his motivation has nothing to do with her. In fact, he doesn’t really give a shit about her. Hades arbitrarily killed his family earlier for, uh, watching as Hades killed some guys who were blaspheming against Zeus (given that Hades says he feeds on fear instead of worship, wouldn’t it be to his benefit to let some schlubs live after seeing him in action? They could go around and talk about what a badass he is). So Perseus’s real goal is to get revenge on Hades. And why is the princess even in the movie? I have no idea.
Moreover, Perseus being motivated by revenge makes him less sympathetic. Sure, a lot of heroes want justice for one reason or another, but those who are motivated entirely by vengeance tend to be pretty grim and boring. It's just overplayed. Wouldn’t you be more interested in someone who’s fighting to save the woman he loves from a horrible fate than in someone who’s fighting to get revenge for the death of some guys who were onscreen for two minutes?
What’s worse, Perseus’s vengeance is a total no-go. At the end, all he manages to do is send Hades back to the Underworld, which is where he started. Hades really didn’t lose anything, he was just foiled for a moment. It’s so anticlimactic. Perseus didn't hurt him at all, he just denied his loan application.
Now, I realize that Star Wars ended the same way, with Vader’s current scheme foiled, but him swearing vengeance, but there, it meant something. The characters were really tied up with what would happen if the Death Star wasn’t destroyed, and then afterward, everyone treated it like a big deal, smiling and hugging and having a big celebration and getting medals. Here, Perseus saves the princess, she asks him if he wants to be king (this seriously comes out of nowhere), he says no, and boom, job’s done.
So for most of the movie, it’s a men on a mission flick in ancient Greece. You might think that sounds pretty cool – Predator meets Xena! – but the trick to a men on a mission flick is to have a cool ensemble. Think about Aliens. There’s Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, Bishop, Apone, Gorman, Drake… I haven’t even seen that movie in years, but I still know those characters. Clash (ineptly) blends the ensemble with the Chosen One genre, so it’s just a bunch of losers playing second fiddle to Perseus. We don’t get to know any of these guys. They’re just a waste of time, I can’t remember any of them. Wait, there’s the bad guy from Casino Royale, he’s in there, and then I think there’s some guy who believes in Zeus (so does he betray the team eventually? No, he just dies like everybody else) and some monster hunters (do they do anything interesting? No, at one point they just say fuck it and go home) and this djinn thing (“I’m here because I’m in the comic,” to quote Josie & The Pussycats. Wait, there isn’t a comic book…). Oh, and there’s Io, played by Gemma Arterton. A god tried to get with her (did you see Quantum of Solace? Can you blame him?) but she turned him down, so he cursed her with... eternal youth.
Behold, the wrath of the gods! Ladies, imagine looking like THIS for all eternity and shudder in fear.
Maybe she used to be a guy.
Douche: Hey baby, is that a moon-toga? Because that ass is out of this world.
Artemis: You’re going to spend the rest of eternity being hit on by assholes.
Girl!Douche: FUUUUUUUUUUU—!
Now he’ll never have sex with Rachel Morgan!
That was a strange interlude.
If you’ve spent the entire review going “yeah, what about the monsters?” well, at least they get that right. They look good, even if they seem like they belong in a horror movie instead of an action movie, and Perseus looks good fighting them. The problem is the boring parts between the monsters. I’m sure the filmmakers actually thought of them as “the boring parts between monsters.” Contrast that with something like Star Trek, where instead of having boring bits between space battles, the dudes thought stuff like “okay, now Scotty gets to do something awesome, and then Spock says live long and prosper, and then we can do that running joke, and then we have this line where we get an awesome insight into McCoy’s character, AND THEN a space battle!” That’s the attitude we should be encouraging in movies, not putting up with a shitty Happy Meal so we can get a plastic toy. And especially not in crap-ass 3D.
ETA: In the interests of being interesting, apparently the movie was pretty massively changed from the initial vision. Can you imagine if, say, a vineyard were run like Hollywood? "Jean-Pierre, everyone is a big fan of the new wine, but it's not testing well among women ages 18-40. Women like perfume and unicorns, so we're going to be mixing some of that into the wine. No one else will mind, and even more people will like your wine! Win/win!"
*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?*
See, for some reason, the filmmakers decided to make Zeus into God and Hades into Satan (I guess that would make Perseus Jesus. How original, the hero is a Christ figure). The characters talk about how much Zeus loves humanity so many times that you could turn it into a drinking game. He loves humanity so much that it takes him a whole five seconds to listen to the evil Hades and decide to wreck humanity’s shit. But see, Hades wants to take over and live on humanity’s fear instead of worship. Brrrr, we’d live in fear of Hades instead of living in fear of Zeus siccing Hades on us! I really don’t see much of a difference, we’d just be cutting out the middleman. Probably save us a bundle on sacrifices.
Look, Hollywood, if you want to make a movie about Christian mythology, make a movie about Christian mythology. Do an epic movie about David killing Goliath and then some sequels about his fail as King David, that would get butts in seats. But don’t just arbitrarily turn every other culture in a fanfic of the Bible. It’s boring. Here, it’s damning. In a movie that could’ve been about laying siege to Mount Olympus, all our hero does is help out in an internal power struggle. It’s like if in a WW2 movie, a crack commando unit set out to assassinate Hitler and ended up helping him stop a coup by Gobbells.
And, really weirdly, they changed the story of Perseus so Zeus (the nice guy who Perseus is trying to keep in power) is less sympathetic! Instead of romancing some guy’s daughter, he rapes someone’s wife as punishment for the guy, producing Perseus. Then later, he turns the guy into a monster. Why didn't you do that in the first place, you creepy molester? Finally, there’s this seriously odd ending where Perseus and Zeus kinda reconcile? It’s like a beer commercial. I challenge you not to think “Hey, dad, remember that time you raped my mom?” throughout this scene.
Anyway, the rest of the story hews mostly to the original movie. A princess is going to be sacrificed to the Kraken, and our man Perseus goes on a quest to save her (note: they screw this up), encountering most of the same creatures Harry Hamlin did except for Bubo, because this is a grown-up movie for grown-ups, and grown-ups don’t laugh. The problem is, they take it really seriously, to the point where the movie is just grim and humorless. I think a total of one person smiles in this movie, and it’s because he’s getting killed by Medusa.
Yet at the same time, it’s really silly. The characters are all redshirts aside from Perseus, and he’s Sam Worthington. No offense, but the guy just isn’t that charismatic. Guys like Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, they seemed interesting no matter who they were playing. You’d like to get a beer with them. Worthington just looks like a badass, which admittedly is more than a lot of American actors can pull off (c.f. the Captain America casting process), but he’s all glowering rage and man-pain. You get the feeling that if you got a beer with him, he’d spend the entire night staring at the wall, trying to intimidate it with his thousand-yard stare.
Seriously, does his jaw ever unclench?
Now, they could’ve gone in two equally different directions. One, they could’ve tried really hard to make it an A-movie. Really explored the idea of mankind rebelling against the gods, treated it seriously, maybe even made it with an R-rating. Something like The Bourne Identity in tone and atmosphere.
OR! They could’ve done it with a light touch, and focused on making it a fun ride. You know, like Iron Man, Star Trek, Hellboy, or The Mummy, where the situations are serious, but they’re not taken too seriously. Given that it’s a summer action movie from the director of The Transporter and the logline is “Greek superhero takes on giant monsters to save princess from the biggest monster,” I think this is probably the direction they should’ve gone. At least they’d be able to pull it off.
I don’t have anything against grim and gritty movies, but the darkness has to fit the subject matter. Terminator 2 and The Dark Knight are really dark movies, but they deal with some really dark shit. I have no idea why a movie about fighting giant scorpions has to be so depressing. The monsters here are so freaky that I think they’d give most kids nightmares. The movie is so gory and grotesque, yet at the same time lacking any thematic concepts that demand that freakiness. It’s like a Spawn comic.
“Mommy, Mommy, I wanna see that movie with the monsters JESUS CHRIST, I WANNA GO HOME!”
Going back to what I said about not being a serious movie, this movie plays more like a storyboard than a film. You know how in Star Wars, there were these long scenes where Luke had conversations and revealed his character? You got to know him, his dreams, his frustrations, and so you had an emotional connection to him when the action started. There’s none of that in Clash. The scenes flip by like setpieces in a Bourne movie, giving you just enough to know what’s going on.
Boom-here’s Perseus-Boom-here’s his family-boom-they’re dead now-boom-now he’s meeting the princess-boom-she’s in danger, he has to rescue her-boom-he’s given a group of men to help him-boom-they’re dead now too-boom-he won’t accept the gods’ help-boom-oh wait, I guess he will-boom-he killed the Kraken!-boom-stay tuned next week for more wild adventures!
So as you might’ve surmised, Perseus’s goal is to save the princess, but his motivation has nothing to do with her. In fact, he doesn’t really give a shit about her. Hades arbitrarily killed his family earlier for, uh, watching as Hades killed some guys who were blaspheming against Zeus (given that Hades says he feeds on fear instead of worship, wouldn’t it be to his benefit to let some schlubs live after seeing him in action? They could go around and talk about what a badass he is). So Perseus’s real goal is to get revenge on Hades. And why is the princess even in the movie? I have no idea.
Moreover, Perseus being motivated by revenge makes him less sympathetic. Sure, a lot of heroes want justice for one reason or another, but those who are motivated entirely by vengeance tend to be pretty grim and boring. It's just overplayed. Wouldn’t you be more interested in someone who’s fighting to save the woman he loves from a horrible fate than in someone who’s fighting to get revenge for the death of some guys who were onscreen for two minutes?
What’s worse, Perseus’s vengeance is a total no-go. At the end, all he manages to do is send Hades back to the Underworld, which is where he started. Hades really didn’t lose anything, he was just foiled for a moment. It’s so anticlimactic. Perseus didn't hurt him at all, he just denied his loan application.
Now, I realize that Star Wars ended the same way, with Vader’s current scheme foiled, but him swearing vengeance, but there, it meant something. The characters were really tied up with what would happen if the Death Star wasn’t destroyed, and then afterward, everyone treated it like a big deal, smiling and hugging and having a big celebration and getting medals. Here, Perseus saves the princess, she asks him if he wants to be king (this seriously comes out of nowhere), he says no, and boom, job’s done.
So for most of the movie, it’s a men on a mission flick in ancient Greece. You might think that sounds pretty cool – Predator meets Xena! – but the trick to a men on a mission flick is to have a cool ensemble. Think about Aliens. There’s Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, Bishop, Apone, Gorman, Drake… I haven’t even seen that movie in years, but I still know those characters. Clash (ineptly) blends the ensemble with the Chosen One genre, so it’s just a bunch of losers playing second fiddle to Perseus. We don’t get to know any of these guys. They’re just a waste of time, I can’t remember any of them. Wait, there’s the bad guy from Casino Royale, he’s in there, and then I think there’s some guy who believes in Zeus (so does he betray the team eventually? No, he just dies like everybody else) and some monster hunters (do they do anything interesting? No, at one point they just say fuck it and go home) and this djinn thing (“I’m here because I’m in the comic,” to quote Josie & The Pussycats. Wait, there isn’t a comic book…). Oh, and there’s Io, played by Gemma Arterton. A god tried to get with her (did you see Quantum of Solace? Can you blame him?) but she turned him down, so he cursed her with... eternal youth.
Behold, the wrath of the gods! Ladies, imagine looking like THIS for all eternity and shudder in fear.
Maybe she used to be a guy.
Douche: Hey baby, is that a moon-toga? Because that ass is out of this world.
Artemis: You’re going to spend the rest of eternity being hit on by assholes.
Girl!Douche: FUUUUUUUUUUU—!
Now he’ll never have sex with Rachel Morgan!
That was a strange interlude.
If you’ve spent the entire review going “yeah, what about the monsters?” well, at least they get that right. They look good, even if they seem like they belong in a horror movie instead of an action movie, and Perseus looks good fighting them. The problem is the boring parts between the monsters. I’m sure the filmmakers actually thought of them as “the boring parts between monsters.” Contrast that with something like Star Trek, where instead of having boring bits between space battles, the dudes thought stuff like “okay, now Scotty gets to do something awesome, and then Spock says live long and prosper, and then we can do that running joke, and then we have this line where we get an awesome insight into McCoy’s character, AND THEN a space battle!” That’s the attitude we should be encouraging in movies, not putting up with a shitty Happy Meal so we can get a plastic toy. And especially not in crap-ass 3D.
ETA: In the interests of being interesting, apparently the movie was pretty massively changed from the initial vision. Can you imagine if, say, a vineyard were run like Hollywood? "Jean-Pierre, everyone is a big fan of the new wine, but it's not testing well among women ages 18-40. Women like perfume and unicorns, so we're going to be mixing some of that into the wine. No one else will mind, and even more people will like your wine! Win/win!"
*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.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-14 08:00 pm (UTC)Actually the rape thing--which I find abhorrent in every way--is a common theme in Greek mythology. Rape, kidnappings, gods' inhumanity to man. It's all in there.
It's a shame this wasn't a more successful movie than you describe it. There's a ton of great material to be culled from mythology. All it needs is a screenwriter and director to make it more heroic and fun.
I'm thinking Sam Raimi (director of Spider-Man I, II, and III).
no subject
Date: 2010-04-14 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-14 11:34 pm (UTC)I love your Star Wars references by the way. I think I'm going to throw in "Episode 4 A New Hope" now.
Oh, btw. About that movie "Deadgirl", THAT came out of nowhere! LOL!
no subject
Date: 2010-04-15 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-15 02:32 pm (UTC)Protip; read Matt Stover's "Shatterpoint", the best Mace Windu novel ever.
EVER.
Shatterpoint
Date: 2010-04-15 11:47 pm (UTC)Have you read _Yoda: Dark Rendezvous_?
Re: Shatterpoint
Date: 2010-04-16 02:16 am (UTC)I also noticed the similarities to Heart of Darkness, which AN itself was a retelling of. Given that I never saw the film, and I found the novella to be pretty bleak, I kinda liked HoD meets Star Wars meets Action Movie. I also found the fight scenes to be remarkably well written, and the philosophy intriguing. I also found the big reveal--which I won't spoil here--to have a lot of emotional impact.
I liked Dark Rendezvous because it portrayed Yoda excellently as a teacher and as a father figure for the entire Jedi order, without diminishing his awesome one bit. Oh, and it was funny too. Arguably better than that "Jedi Apprentice" kids book series.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-15 07:47 pm (UTC)