I felt ripped off too

Rating: 4/10 (3 April 2010)

While Hollywood pours millions into dazzling special effects, why it so often fails at a more rudimentary level -- of telling stories that elicit more than juvenile emotional responses -- is beyond me. Clash of the Titans 2010 is not unlike other monstrosities pooped out of the cinematic mill in that it joins producers' and consumers' hands in two dirty hours of collective impoverishment of feeling, of imagination, and no amount of computer-generated wizardry can conceal its basic vapidity. Come on, the scorpions were idiotic! -- and so are you, Warner Brothers!
When you buy something you know is a sham, you might liken the seller to a thief. The commercial dishonesty that this production stinks of nudges it closer to the side of thievery: all those 3D glasses did was dim the screen to a dusky obscurity and hurt my ears.
The original 1981 film seemed to relish in the netherworldly grotesquery of its images. Full disclosure: I grew up on that film and remember being endlessly fascinated, and horror-stricken, by the Medusa, by all the demons of that (claymation) world, and the powerful contrast they drew with its self-consciously 'beautiful' 'beauties.'
Speaking of which, father Zeus's supernatural gift to Perseus of an earlier brutalized, fully revived Io as sexual reward (notwithstanding Andromeda's relegation, vis-a-vis the story arch of the 1981 version, to mere means to Perseus's vindictive ends) called feminist film critic Laura Mulvey to mind, and her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" opens a whole different critique of Louis Leterrier's epic sausage fest.