The World Cup may be starting today, but I’m still catching up on films I saw in the cinema earlier this year. I’ve reached April (I talked about Kick-Ass when it came out at the time), for those of you at home keeping score, so I might even reach a time when I’ll be able to talk about films when I actually see them.
Earlier this week, I talked about watching Alice In Wonderland in 3D even though it hadn’t been filmed in 3D; the same is true of Clash of the Titans. Shot as a normal 2D film, it was digitised for the sole reason of money: 3D is more expensive to watch, so the box office will be bigger. There is no other justification, and I did not want to see it in 3D; however, finding a 2D screening at a sensible time was almost impossible, and I ended up in the 3D screening. I really wish I hadn’t – it didn’t do anything for the film at all.
I guess I only saw this film because I quite like Greek mythology (one of the reasons I saw Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which stole some of the thunder on that front), and an affection for the original 1981 film, even though I know it’s not very good. But at least the original film had a narrative – this film just jumps from one action piece to the next without logic or reason. According to nerdbastards.com, the film was originally rather different but was cut to ‘simplify’ things, but the result is even more of a mess; this at least explains why this film is such a load of nonsense.
I could bore you my issues with the movie, like the lack of reason for why Perseus (Sam Worthington; very bland) is chosen for the mission to find the tools to save Andromeda, the princess of the vain mother who gets her into trouble in the first place, or the lack of logic in why they have the massive scorpions turn up (before they end up using them as transport), or the bizarre inclusion of Djinn in a film loosely based on Greek mythology, or the awful dialogue, or the unlikeliness of the pairing of Pete Postlethwaite and Elizabeth McGovern as Perseus’ adoptive parents, or the idiotic ‘cameo’ of Bubo, or the fact that the theme of the film (Perseus doesn’t want to be a demigod, he wants to be human) completely misses the point of the Greek mythology – trying to superimpose banal ‘humanistic’ traits on stories that were all about the gods of Olympus playing with mortals shows a complete lack of understanding. But it looks I failed in that regard.
Some good things? Erm, Ralph Fiennes is good as Hades (although I felt a bit sorry for Liam Neeson as Zeus), as are some of the older hands who are part of Perseus’ team (Mads Mikkelsen, Liam Cunningham). The CGI is all right, I suppose – it was hard to tell with the mess of the faux 3D. But that’s all I can recall. I hope you managed to avoid it in the cinema like any other sensible person, and I’m depressed that there is going to be a sequel.
Rating: DA
