Clash of the Titans

 

Released in 1981 after a difficult production history, Clash of the Titans was famously the swansong of visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, who retired from filmmaking shortly after he finished it.  Already in his sixties, it is likely that the advent of Star Wars and the new age of special effects had shown him which way the wind was blowing, and that his kind of small-scale monster picture would not survive the new era that was coming.

It was a good way to bow out, as Clash is the most lavishly produced Harryhausen film, and boasted the biggest budget he’d ever worked with.  He created a huge cast of monsters for the movie, from the humanoid Calibos to the winged Pegasus, from the mesmerizingly terrifying Medusa to the towering, city-flattening Kraken.  It is also the film in his ouvre that has most in common with Sword & Sorcery, and displays more grit, horror, and violence than any of the other, more kid-friendly movies in the Harryhausen history.

The original script was apparently much more pulpy, with the Kraken ripping Pegasus into bloody pieces at the end, and Andromeda spending a lot of time naked.  As it is, there is still quite a bit of pulp DNA in this, with some casual nudity and some quite graphic violence.  Between Calibos getting his hand chopped off, the soldiers’ gruesome deaths at the stingers of the giant scorpions, Medusa’s bloody decapitation, and the butchery of her two-headed guard dog, there is a good bit of gore to be found, certainly out of bounds from what one expected from a Harryhausen movie.  The film opens with King Acrisius putting his daughter and her infant son in a coffin and casting it out to sea while she wails and begs for her life, followed shortly by the complete destruction of the city of Argos.  It’s actually pretty intense.

The cast is famously star-studded, with both big names and some that would go on to greater notoriety later.  Lawrence Olivier may have been phoning it in with laser Floyd lights behind his head, but his natural gravitas and authority made him the perfect Zeus.  The gods are rounded out by other well-known names like Ursula Andress, Pat Roach, Claire Bloom, and Maggie Smith as the antagonist, Thetis.  Sian Phillips does a lot with a small part as Queen Cassiopeia, and Judi Bowker adds some spark to the bland princess role.  Harry Hamlin as Perseus is good-looking, but comes across as rather dim, and he’s not that good an actor, being totally upstaged by Burgess Meredith as his funny sidekick.

In Sword & Sorcery the gods are always either distant and unknowable, or they are monsters from some ancient epoch when mankind was cattle.  In Clash the gods are – as in the genuine epics – very much present in the narrative.  They talk to the hero and villain, they take sides, they grant favors and send gifts.  What keeps this from turning into a moral axis that would be more reminiscent of High Fantasy is that the Greek pantheon were never paragons of virtue.  The gods were just very much like people with their passions writ large.  The whole story starts because Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants, and the rivalry between Perseus and Calibos is fueled by them both being the semidivine children of gods, favored by their parents.

There’s nothing inherently opposed to S&S with this idea, as there is never a sense that Perseus is engaged in some kind of holy crusade.  He is caught up in a very personal struggle to save the woman he loves and defeat the subhuman monstrosity who has cursed her and the city she will someday rule.  That he is aided by Zeus, his father, while Calibos is aided by his mother Thetis makes it seem more like a war by proxy, with the divine parents using their children as agents to fight each other.

But Perseus is saved as a hero figure because he does not get everything given to him by his dad.  He takes actions that he decides on himself, and which take courage and involve great danger.  Nobody told him he had to tame Pegasus, consult cannibal witches, or do battle with the Kraken – those are all things he decides to do himself, he just gets some help along the way.  At the end, when he rides across seemingly half the Levant to face the Kraken, he gets just the tiniest nudge from Zeus to help him along.

This isn’t really a Sword & Sorcery film, because the characters are drawn too broadly, and too easily divided into good guys and bad guys.  But the crazy, overheated landscape of monsters and curses, bloody burnings and beheadings, and of everything being at the whim of capricious, vindictive gods is something that could definitely be made to work.  Almost 30 years later Hollywood decided this needed a remake and, unfortunately, we will get to that one next.

Heart of the Night

 

Utuzan went alone into the western desert, and a flame went before him to light his way.  He left the fortress of Hamun at the setting of the moon, and no one saw him, for he moved as one with the night.  Once he was away from the works of man, among the rocks and the sand, he held up the ancient jewel called the Heart of Anatu and he called forth a light from within it.

He studied the indecipherable carvings upon the translucent red stone, uncut and rough.  Even he did not know where it came from, or who had marked it.  In his long-ago age it had been a forbidden thing, a relic of an ancient goddess who the people of the empire did not revere.  Only he had dared to take it up, only he had dared to use it, and it had always given him strength, always been his ally.  Now, it was faded from what it had been, and his power seemed to fade with it.

Since his poisoning he had been weakened.  He still knew all his secrets and mysteries – the names of wind and fire, the conjuring of spirits from outside time and light.  It was his innate power that had been sapped, and he at last had come to understand that the heart had spent too much strength to preserve him.  Its power was finite after all, and now it was dying.  It grieved him, as the loss of a friend, for without it he would be very alone in this fallen age.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Every so often, Hollywood decides to try another King Arthur adaptation, and it seems like they just keep getting worse, because this is one of the most grandly, flagrantly bad versions I have ever seen. Oh, I am sure there have been worse ones, since the Arthurian legends have been done so many times, but how often does a movie studio decide to launch $175+ million at a project so completely misguided? A movie where every narrative decision prompts another chorus of what were they thinking?

Ever since he married Madonna, Guy Ritchie has been making questionable decisions, but a run of success with his Sherlock Holmes movies got some people thinking he was a great director, despite there being little evidence that he is anything but a competent cinematographer. Anyway, apparently 3 or 4 King Arthur scripts were Frankensteined together to make this horror, and it shows in the almost complete lack of any kind of tonal consistency. This is a movie that doesn’t know whether it is a high fantasy, a gritty crime thriller, a political allegory, or a jaunty action-adventure, instead just deciding to shift gears whenever it feels like it.

The problem with shoehorning the Arthurian tale into one movie is that the real villain is Mordred, who is Arthur’s son and thus shows up way too late to serve as a foil for an origin story. This movie “solves” the problem by making the bad guy Uther’s evil brother Vortigern, who is played by Jude Law doing his oily, charming villain thing. He does a good job with the role, but Vortigern is so obviously evil and treacherous that it makes Uther (Eric Bana in a part so small it’s basically a cameo) look like a complete idiot for trusting him even a little bit.

The opening of the movie sets the stage by showing what the whole rest of the movie will be like: it looks awesome, it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s about as Arthurian as World of Warcraft. Less, maybe. The prologue explains how humans “lived in peace” with “the Mages” until the “Mage Sorcerer King Mordred” started some shit. And so you get a massive assault on Camelot by elephants that make the Oliphants from Return of the King look like pygmies. They come shambling in, entire fortresses on their backs, crushing everything in their path. It looks freaking amazing, but it is such a complete butchery of the legends as well as anything resembling history, that I am not sure what it is supposed to accomplish.

It gets even crazier from there, with Vortigern sacrificing his wife to a trio of tentacled siren/witches (who are never explained) that live in pools under Camelot (also never explained) and they help him overthrow Uther by turning him into a towering, armored, Grim Reaper dude who looks almost exactly like Frazetta’s Death Dealer and wields a ridiculous double-ended scythe. He kills Uther and Igraine, and little Arthur floats down what is apparently supposed to be the Thames to “Londinium”, where he is taken in and raised by whores in a bordello.

If you already have a lot of questions, well, neither I nor the movie have much in the way of answers for you. Part of the problem reviewing this movie is the fact that it would take a 10,000-word essay to unpack all of the stupid shit going on here. Do I talk about how Uther, before dying, throws Excalibur in the air and lets it impale him, and then he turns to stone and sinks to the bottom of the lake? Do I discuss how we keep talking about “Mages” as a separate race, despite that having no correspondence in the legends? Do we talk about how Arthur learns to fight from an Asian guy who has a martial arts dojo in “Londinium” and that said guy is called “Kung Fu George”?

It’s just so painful, the moreso because the cast is generally pretty good, and the movie is filled with images and scenes that actually work and have some resonance to them. The problem is that most of the scenes don’t seem to have much to do with each other, and so they don’t build to make something greater, they just pass by and are over and then something completely different starts. There are too many elements that go nowhere or are so bizarre they need explanations which never come. Ritchie makes some good sequences, but he can’t make this mess into something coherent, and he doesn’t seem interested in trying.

And this movie is a complete failure as an adaptation because it shows no desire to respect the myths it is supposed to be based on. The characters from the legends are nothing like their onscreen counterparts, and there is no attempt to make this feel like an Arthurian piece, rather they just slap a bunch of names on things and call it done. If this had been a fantasy unconnected to anything, it would actually have been better, because it has some cool elements and ideas, but they needed developing. This could have made a fine Sword & Sorcery movie if the creators had been able to make up their minds about what the hell they were trying to do, and cut out all the extraneous shit that didn’t need to be there. The only consolation in the whole mess is that the idiots who screwed it up lost a shit-ton of money, and the five planned sequels will thankfully never be made.

The Killing Dark

Arsinue felt the sun dying, even through the stone walls of her crypt. By day she slept here, shielded from all light, her limbs heavy with a languor she could not resist, but when the day waned she woke and lay here in silence and cold, waiting for the night, all but unable to move. Alone, she seethed with the anger in her, with the will that sustained her now, beyond the gate of death.

In the beginning she had denied that her brother’s traitor poison had done its work, and that she had survived, but now she knew she had not. Now she knew that her spirit had passed through the barrier into the Fields of the Dead, and yet she was not dead. She walked and breathed and spoke and hungered. Hers was a living death, and at first she had dwelled in terror of what she had become. Now she knew she had been given the power to revenge herself and to fight for her kingdom.

The sun vanished below the horizon, and it was as though she felt a coolness come over her stone tomb. She thrust her hands up, suddenly alive with purpose, and she pushed aside the great lid of the sarcophagus in which she slumbered during the daylight hours. She rose up naked in the torchlit dark of this deep place, and she heard the soft chanting of the priests of Anatu. This hidden temple was the only place she had found refuge, and from here she stretched forth her hand to take back the power that had been stolen from her.