Thursday 28 February 2013

Clash of the Titans (2010)





















I went into this film thinking it would be good...boy was I wrong! this is an epic failure of errr epic proportions, in short I hated it, it is bad, very bad. For starters if possible its actually more hammy and cheesy than the original, the God scenes on Mount Olympus are awful and look like something outta Flash Gordon, I realise its suppose to be heavenly but the shiny silver armor?? come on, surely they could of been a little less camp.

That's just for starters, the acting from everyone (and I mean EVERYONE!!) is terrible, really bad and I see what people have been saying about Worthington now, a really poor performance here, almost TV movie standards. The less said about Neeson and Fiennes panto performances the better (the CGI on show that accompanied Fiennes was laughable, simply awful).

As for the film its just a jumbled mess and takes a totally different path to the original making it completely wrong frankly, as usual Hollywood MUST add or make up new stuff and ruin the entire story, why? Christ knows. For some reason we have a whole new species of blue eyed rock creatures or something, they look ridiculous, like something outta 'Zena Warrior Princess', plus we hardly see Calibos or Pegasus and there are just huge chunks missing in the story involving Calibos and Pegasus, I could go on.

The other stand out failure was certain scenes and the look of the film, the river Styx scene for example, in the original its filmed on location, its eerie, misty, you don't see much of the boatman which lends a nice air of spookiness, its a really nice setup. In the new version its clearly on a set, you see the boatman fully taking all atmosphere out of the scene and the boat is fudging huge! Second example, Medusa's lair, in the original its dark, tense, quite eerie and spooky, stone people everywhere,
Medusa is actually quite a scary creature and like in all good fantasy films she is hidden until the last moment. In the new version we see Medusa almost straight away, she has a human face which isn't scary, its not eerie or in the least bit tense, zero atmosphere. Clearly another tacky set with over the top CGI and its all over too quickly with silly big effect stunts and leaping around. I think the term less is more sums up the film comparisons perfectly here, this new version getting it lost in translation.

Only plus points...the Kraken is pretty wicked looking and Pegasus is smart looking despite being the wrong colour. His wings are the best CGI in the film and there's a lovely little cameo from Bubo thank the Gods.
I can't recommend this, its an insult to the original classic, its terrible, no heart and soul and is just another overblown CGI mess. Such a shame and wasted chance, I really hope they don't remake any other classic Harryhausen films, stick the far superior original.


2/10

2 comments:

  1. I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to the classic Harryhausen movies and whatnot, so I didn't have anything to compare this film to when I first saw it. (The only stop-motion live-action film I'd ever seen at that point was Jason and the Argonauts). I really liked Clash of the Titans. I thought the scorpions and sand 'jin' were great, they did a decent job on Medusa, and I loved their design of The Kraken. On the other hand, the acting was terrible, the feud between Zeus and Hades was kind of weak, and the SFX weren't fantastic. It's not a good movie, but I liked it :) (Wrath of the Titans I despised though)!

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  2. Check out my classic Harryhausen review page ;)

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