Could've been Lord of the Ring'ish, now it is just eye candy without substance

Rating: 4/10 (9 January 2011)

I think the easiest way to assess this movie is to compare it to the Lords of the Rings movies by Peter Jackson, because this movie is at the surface similar to those.
The effects are on the level of LotR. No negatives here.
What the movie lacks severely in comparison to LotR is story development and character development.
To see the flaws, it's enough to watch the first few minutes of the film. Perseus is found by a fisherman and adopted. Between this and Perseus reaching adulthood, only two minutes of screen time is taken. We only learn that Perseus is some kind of son of the gods; no character development is attempted beyond that.
Then we're thrown at some kind of fishing trip where (except complaining about bad results) eventually they spot a giant statue of Zeus. Perseus' father expresses his admiration of it, but a few seconds later it turns out soldiers are actually cutting its feet off. "WHAT ARE THEY DOING???" "They have declared war, war upon the gods!!" This should be enough to illustrate how the viewer is thrown from scene to scene without any build up. Whereas a sentence such as "they have declared...war upon the gods" would have carried weight if there had been a deeper context, it is just hollow words in this movie.
Then, some nice special effects happen, and (here is a spoiler, but it doesn't matter), Perseus' father gets drowned due to supernatural causes. Do we as viewers feel much about this? Not really. Again, we don't know the character who dies, except by the sum of one minute of generic rambling about father-son bonds and anger of gods that we saw earlier.
Returning to the overall picture, I feel that this movie was created with the premise "Hey, this movie hasn't been remade yet, we can make money here!" It is easy to see how much more of a solid foundation a project like the LotR movies is built on.