I remember seeing the 2010 remake of CLASH OF THE TITANS in the theaters when it was released. My only memory of it then was questioning, "why bother?". 15 years later, the same question looms.
Maybe I just have too soft of a spot for the 1981 original. With its choppy Ray Harryhausen effects, Laurence Olivier as Zeus and a wacky robot owl, it remains a true guilty pleasure.
This time around, the $125 million budget is splashed all over the screen with then state-of-the-art CGI and plenty of stars.
Sam Worthington (Avatar, Terminator Salvation) is a worthy Perseus, the bastard son of Zeus (Liam Neeson) who has a particular set of skills...oh wait, that's another.......
Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace), Alexa Davalos (FBI: Most Wanted) and Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) are all fine, but Ralph Fiennes (Conclave) steals the entire film as Hades, serving up a baddie that would go toe-tot-toe with Lord V.
If you loved the 80's original film like I did, you'll likely find yourself spending most of the running time waiting for the updated versions of the most famous sequences.
The Kraken rising out of the sea looks a hell of a lot more like Godzilla and better than the original, and Perseus and team's battle against Medusa looks a thousand times more realistic than Harry Hamlin prancing around avoiding a stop motion medusa puppet. The swooping camera and that coiling tail look great. But is this CGI version better? It's stunning, but somehow it seems to lose much of its charm when it looks this real.
The feel of "The Golden Age of Sinbad" or any other 70's swashbuckler gets lost in the relentless visual onslaught, noise and Raman Djawadi's uninspired score that could be from any of his episodes of "Game of Thrones". Compare any scene's music to the 1981 film's music by Laurence Rosenthal and it pales, badly.
Director Lois Leterrier has churned out plenty of routine, genre efforts like "Fast X" but he has shown terrific style in films like "Transporter 2" and "Now You See Me". This one falls in the former category.
It can be fun. The scene battling the giant scorpions is an exciting sequence, well staged. Any time Neeson and Fiennes are on the screen together, it's terrific.
If the film was half as good as this amazing original trailer below, I would have left the 1981 original far behind.
Alas, this CLASH only occasionally thrills, sputtering to a C.
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