3rd Time's the Charm, They Say. (This is #2.)

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2010)

Clash of the Titans (3-D, 1:46, PG-13) — 5 — Fantasy: Sword & Sorcery, 2nd string, remake
My standard for what it takes to justify a remake has always been that the original movie has to have had lots of potential but been poorly executed. To that I must now add a codicil: The remake must aspire to doing better, not just the same thing with different faces and technology.
Yes, the new Clash of the Titans features CGI instead of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation, 3-D instead of 2-D, and Sam Worthington instead of Harry Hamlin as Jake Sully, er, Perseus. But it's still a superficial version of one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. The dialog is stilted and fakey, but (perhaps fortuitously) there's not much of it, and for variety it comes in several different accents. We find out what's going on mainly thru voiceovers (such as the entire cosmology of ancient Greece condensed into a quick minute or 2 of astronomical establishing shots) and exposition provided by characters — mainly Perseus's immortal guardian Io (Gemma Arterton) — who conveniently turn up just when their information is needed.
It's a bad sign when the movie fails to engage you to the extent that you devote your leftover attention to comparing it to other films. In this case, the one that kept popping into my mind was Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which featured much the same cast of characters. Wasn't it just a couple of months ago that Medusa had her head lopped off by someone else? Didn't this Mount Olympus look grander, even while its gods looked smaller? Does Sam's barber have a contractual commitment to follow him to each new movie? Was that really Dr. Bashir who zipped fleetingly across the screen (as one would expect of Hermes)?
I suppose nobody will really be any more disappointed than they were back in 1981 at the false advertising of the title. There are no titans in this film. Those creators of the universe were all killed off long ago by their children, the gods. And the gods themselves don't clash, either, except for a certain snotty one-uppery. No, this is about humans rebelling against the gods. Zeus (Liam Neeson) created the humans because the gods needed to feed on their worship (no word on what they ate beforehand), and he's been indulgent of them to the extent that they've developed an independent streak and dialed back on the adulation. This saddens Zeus, but it really pisses off his brother Hades (Ralph Fiennes), who'd rather have humans' fear than their respect.
So, just as with The Lightning Thief, there's a completely arbitrary deadline imposed (in this case an upcoming solar eclipse) for the protagonist to produce the mcguffin (here a sacrificial princess instead of the purloined thunderbolt) lest calamity befall everyone.
The movie was visually dark (probably a byproduct of the Real-D projection technique), and it was hard to follow the action sequences due to all the quick cutting between viewpoints. I rolled my eyes at the generous dungeon master among the screenwriters who thot "Hey, let's have the hero walk across a meadow and just stumble across a +2 magic sword. Everybody will believe that!". OTOH, the critter work was terrific: the giant scorpions, the gorgon's snaky body and hair, the pegasi, and especially the kraken were extremely well realized.
And, as I said above (but it bears repeating), the source material has survived for thousands of years for a very good reason — it's just a crackerjack good story. Perhaps some day a film will come along that will do it justice. 3rd time's the charm, they say. (For the record, this was #2.)