A terrible mess, created only to show the latest FX monsters

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 2010)

Mind you, the old version of "Clash of the Titans" was nowhere near a good movie. I was rather disappointed already when I watched that at the cinema almost 30 years ago. Therefore I thought it would be easy for the remake to exceed the little qualities there were, but I was mistaken. The only redeeming value are the special effects again: Ray Harryhausen's cute models back then, an impressive Medusa and powerful scorpions now. Perseus is a short haired soldier boy now with no character depth whatsoever: he's got a vague feeling he is on a revenge mission against the gods, whatever, and (SPOILER) when his lost love returns to life, he kinda shrugs 'oh, nice to have', that's about as far as his emotional concern goes. The complex cast of Immortals from Greek mythology is reduced to a simple Good Guy, Bad Guy scheme (Creator and Tempter), which means the other gods don't have any function, embarrassed they stand around, watching Zeus and Hades. Cutting the best scenes of Apollo, as the deleted scenes on the DVD prove, was a bad mistake. The makers failed to realize the potential of a different cosmic order which knew many shades of gray, and they even seem to have lost interest in some characters entirely along the way. Thus the audience wouldn't care, for example, if the Kraken ate Andromeda for dinner. Most remember the main actor only vaguely as "the guy from Avatar" which is telling a lot - you don't need a new Kirk Douglas for this circus.
I recall somewhere below, a reviewer wrote something like there should be a law against remakes which are made for the sole reason that we have a new generation of effects at hand. I wholeheartedly agree with that.