Wrath of the Titans

 

This is a strange one, because as a sequel to a remake that no one liked, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for this movie to exist, except for money to be made in foreign markets.  It’s always weird to make a sequel to something that is a remake or a reboot, and this had a new director, new screenwriters, and only a few returning members of the original cast.  Everything about this signals that the movie should be complete shit, and yet it is somehow ten times more awesome than the movie it is following.

The better script goes a long way, as we are freed from most of the bad dialogue and painful narration of the original.  The overarching story of men at war with the gods didn’t seem to have anything to do with the original Clash or the remake, really, but freed from the constraints of interpretation, this movie develops the idea into a crazy kind of superhero/mythological mashup that is like nothing else you have ever seen.

Sam Worthington is back as Perseus, but without his military buzzcut or his dull love interest, as Gemma Arterton was unavailable, so she was killed off between movies.  Perseus’s motivation this time out is his young son, and Worthington actually does much better connecting with the kid than he ever did with anyone else.  Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Danny Huston are back as the trio of Zeus, Hades and Poseidon, and we also get Bill Nighy as Hephaestus and Toby Kebbel as Agenor, bastard son of Poseidon.  Princess Andromeda gets a big upgrade from Alexa Davalos to Rosamund Pike, and goes from damsel in distress to warrior queen.

Free to invent, Wrath goes big, depicting a war against and among the gods, and isn’t shy about killing them off.  There are shifting rivalries and alliances, and there is not really a set moral compass.  The characters battle in a welter of uncertainty and necessity, trying to survive, and not on any holy or unholy crusade.  The movie kind of depicts the gods as parasitic, beings who were once needed but have now outlived their time and must be destroyed.  The new villain in this one is Ares, played with excellent selfish impulsiveness by the underrated Edgar Ramirez.

The effects in this one are so much better than in Clash it borders on shocking.  The set piece battles look amazing, and it’s obvious the growth of the MCU at the time was having an effect on how the action was depicted and shot.  The year before, Immortals had covered a lot of the same subject matter, and despite strong art direction, the action in that film now looks petty and small compared to the huge, thundering, mountain-breaking battles of this one.  The CGI is first-rate here, and it really brings everything to life alongside some inspired creature design, like the freaky chimerae, or the weird machai with their two bodies grown together.

Away from the expectations of a remake, the movie is more its own thing, and comes off as miles better for it.  The script is much better, with some real character moments and some genuine humor, rather than the dull exposition-fest of the first film.  The number of extraneous characters and elements is pared down, and the whole is more focused and seems to be about something, rather than just a bunch of shit thrown in randomly.  The action sequences and battles go really big, and you never feel like they are being held back or pared down.  When Perseus is riding his black pegasus through flying rivers of lava thrown off by the lumbering, molten form of Kronos, it is really like Greek myth as a superhero movie, and it looks spectacular.

Originally there was going to be a third film, but I honestly don’t know where they could have gone, having killed off all the named gods and finished the whole plot arc.  If you passed on this one because of the poor quality of Clash, then be assured this is one sequel that is worth your time.

The Lion Will Rise

Dekenius watched the fire rise against the dawn sky, and the stench of burning flesh came to him like a blessing.  The sun was just coloring the eastern horizon, and he tasted the cool breeze from beyond the horizon in between the breaths of killing and slaughter.  The fortress was ancient and much of it was made from soft stone or even earthen works.  Flames rose from it as from a pottery kiln, and the heat from it distorted the stars.

While it was yet dark he had loosed his war engines upon the fortress and shattered the walls like dry mud.  It burned fiercely in the wash of flaming oil, and he heard the screams of the dying.  Now he sent his legions across the bridge they had made from lashed-together reed boats, and they moved across the flat ground north of the fort to form a barricade between the bastion of his enemies and the deeper waters where they might take to their boats and escape him.

He sat on his horse, sword in hand across his saddle-bow, the shadow of his banner over him like a piece of night that remained in his service.  The stars were fading to pinpricks of silver, and he was glad of the smoke, because at least it masked the underlying smell of rot from the omnipresent river.  The floods were receding, but that only left black, stinking mud where the waters had lain, and for all the peasants rushed to gather up the foul stuff for their fields, Dekenius longed to return to the palace in Qahir where he might at least pretend he was in a civilized country.

From here he could watch as his columns advanced fast across the muddy flat and cut off Arsinue’s forces in the open.  He saw the blur of spears where battle joined, and he closed his eyes for a moment, hoping to hear the clatter of hafts and the battering of shields, but he was too far away.  He simply watched the battle flags move, and by their paths he knew the enemy was being routed, men fleeing across the reed-thick floodland.  They would not reach their boats.

A rider came close and saluted.  “My general, they are broken and fleeing, but there are not very many of them.  It seems this is a token force, left to hold the fortress and slow our advance.”

Dekinius shrugged.  He had expected no less.  Arsinue thought to occupy him with these pitiful old mud forts and her tavern-sweepings while she joined with her nomad army in the east.  He knew that the Hatta had invaded and taken Keshan, and that meant there was an army of horsemen no more than three days ride from where he now stood.  He knew they outnumbered him, but not by how much, for his scouts sent to learn that had not returned, and he did not think they would.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

 

The idea of remaking Clash of the Titans had been kicking around Hollywood since at least the 90s, and once we entered the CGI era that would make the creature effects doable there was more and more interest.  Finally, in 2010, the remake, directed by Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, Now You See Me) arrived in theaters with a heavy thud.  Despite a budget of $125 million and the work of a lot of creditable actors, the film is a complete, disastrous mess.

The result of multiple different screenplays mashed together, the film seems bent on fucking up everything that made the original movie great.  In the 1981 version you get the operatic, brooding opener with Acrisius putting his daughter and bastard grandson into a coffin and casting them into the storming sea while he curses the gods.  It delivers all the exposition you need with a dramatic bit of monologue and a great location shoot.

The new movie, however, never saw anything it couldn’t narrate the fuck out of, and it starts right off with what becomes the major problem of the script: it’s terrible.  The fact that the person writing it could not create decent dialogue to save their life did not stop them from writing a whole fuckton of dialogue that will be crammed into your face in many, many boring scenes of people standing around and delivering exposition in rote, declarative sentences.  The movie even added the character of Io – played by the lovely Gemma Arterton – expressly for the purpose of narrating things, just in case you missed the point that this is all super-serious and not fun.

The quality of the cast is the real tragedy here, as aside from Liam Neeson as Zeus, you have Ralph Fiennes shamelessly hamming it up as Hades, Luke Evans as Apollo, and Alexander Siddig as Hermes – even though he appears on screen for about 10 seconds.  Other familiar faces include Mads Mikkelsen, Alexa Davalos, Jason Flemyng, Liam Cunningham, Nicholas Hoult, Vincent Regan, Polly Walker, Pete Postlethwaite, and Rory McCann, among others.  You will spend the whole movie thinking “hey I know who that is.”  So many good actors, and so little for them to do.  The only one not slumming it is Sam Worthington, who is as bland and dull in the role of Perseus as he is in all his movies.  This was the time period where they were casting him in everything, hoping he was the new Russell Crowe, except it turned out his talent is strictly mediocre.

The story deviates so far from the original that it seems less like a new interpretation and more like mockery.  Here, Perseus is born to Acrisius’s wife, who Zeus seduces, Uther-style.  She is not named, and she dies in the sea-casket, so she never even gets a line.  Then Acrisius is struck by lightning and turns into Calibos, with a makeup design that is really boring and uninspired.  In this movie, Hades is the main antagonist, part of a plotline about humanity rebelling against the gods, which comes across as really, really stupid and forced.  The kraken is not “the last of the titans” as in the original, but a monster Hades created to kill the titans, and despite expensive CGI, it looks nowhere near as cool as Harryhausen’s striking creation.

Andromeda is given nothing to do, has no romance with Perseus, and is demanded as sacrifice for seemingly no reason.  Even after Perseus rescues her, he just leaves to go be with the Goddess of Exposition.  Perseus is saddled with a cast of side-characters who serve as fodder, plus the inexplicable presence of “Djinn”, who look like tree people and seem to be from some other movie.  The design of Medusa is like something out of a video game, rather than the terrifying monster Harryhausen created, and indeed the entire sequence seems like a stage from a video game.

The CGI, overall, is not great, with everything looking muddy and grayish, and yet somehow too shiny, like plastic.  The costumes and set dressing are fantastic, and the digitally-painted backgrounds and vistas look top-notch.  It’s too bad the effects overall look so underdone and ugly, which is not helped by the rather poor art design, which makes everything look too slick.  There is a definite Blizzard kind of aesthetic in the design of the monsters and the gods, so it all kind of reminds me of Diablo.

I don’t object to the idea of making a version of Clash that does things differently, the problem here is that every change they made from the original makes the movie worse, muddies up the story, and makes things more complicated without adding anything except shitty dialogue and sub-par CGI.  In the original movie Perseus falls in love with Andromeda, and everything else follows from that motivation.  In this version, Perseus has no personal motivation except that he’s mad at Hades, and he seems to slog rather grudgingly through the plot.

Despite being a pile of crap, this movie made enough worldwide to warrant a sequel, and that will be where things get interesting.  The idea of men at war with the gods is a good one for both over-the-top action and some genuine existential undertones.  Here the whole theme fell flat, but in the unlikely follow-up, Wrath of the Titans, the full awesome potential was realized.  I’ll get to that one next time.

The Doom Idol

 

Like a storm, the armies of Kadesh poured forth from the borderlands and rode through the valley of the Nahar, a plume of dust in their wake as though they were a fire upon the earth.  Summer was waning, and the floodwaters were drawing away, leaving fields covered in the black mud of the high season.  The roads emerged from the water and dried in the fierce sun, and armies of horsemen rode over them, seeking the heart of empire.

Zudur was at the forefront, high in his war saddle, his helm shielding his face from the sun, and his standard-bearers riding close behind him.  At his side walked the lion who was his only brother now, black mane vibrant in the waning light of day, the rear leg limping slightly as it went, a mirror of the misshapen king who led his hosts to war.

Too long had the warriors of the Hatta rested upon old victories.  Too long had they grazed their horses on sweet grass and rode in hunts and mock battles, forgetting the taste of blood.  Zudur remembered his childhood days, when it seemed the world lay open to their conquest, and the city of Kadesh was only a stop along the path.  He had watched as months became years, and years decades, and now his father was dead and he was king, and no more would he allow the strength of his warriors to wither away.  Ashem awaited, and they would take what had been ordained for them.

If he had any doubt of it, he had only to look on the lion that paced him, sent to him by the god of the sky.  Ezurhad was the god of the lightning and the fire of the storms, and he had led the way of the people out of the eastern lands with a golden lion.  Now another lion followed him and guarded him, and he knew he was favored of the god who had shaped his race like iron on a forge.