Release the Cacophony: A Review of ‘Clash of the Titans’

A gift to the creators of summer blockbuster taglines, “Titans Will Clash” screamed trailers and posters, which is (one hopes) as close as we’ll ever get to a movie being sold on the explicit promise that “Things Will Break” or “Stuff Will Boom”. It might be churlish to mock the lack of actual Titans within the mise-en-scene of the piece (there weren’t any in the 1981 quote-unquote original film, after all), but the fact that what we get in return is a bored-looking Ralph Fiennes and the far from titanic Sam Worthington has got to be cause for complaint.

Worthington (a man who has mastered the fine art not just of looking like he can swordfight when he in truth cannot but also that of looking like he might just be acting when he’s really not) plays demi-god Perseus, a kindly soul who lives with his family on a small boat and seems somewhat starved of opportunities to meet people. Thankfully for him, a brewing war between men and the gods soon overtakes his life, and before he knows it he’s joined a group of Argosian soldiers off on a dangerous quest to ensure their city isn’t destroyed by fabled sea monster The Kraken (one must always put the definite article first, like ‘The Situation’; as for pronunciation, kra-ken seems to be the accepted form, although some cast members add a frisson by calling it The Kruk-en, as though it were a bookcase from Ikea).

The problems set in early, from the structural (if man’s worship/failure to worship the gods is what leads to their displeasure, why is there at no point any demonstration of what form such worship might take?) to the rational (immediately after you directly affront the gods a black vapour congeals itself in the middle of your throne room, manifesting itself into a giant face, and the first question you ask is “who are you?” … really?). There is a way to make a film like this, carefully balancing the grandiose absurdities with light humour and real human emotion – Joss Whedon has made a career out of such calculation.

‘Clash of the Titans’ has no interest in emotion, though, only in things going boom. At times this becomes borderline ingenious, as ancient ruins are re-tooled as battlegrounds, and Greek columns, pediments, friezes (and at one point, I swear, Tibetan statues) are torn asunder; classical culture, already twice shat on by a myth-disregarding film and a logic-disregarding remake, is thrice ground into dust.

Beyond the semiotic appeal of such dispiriting metaphors, what we are left with is a truly awful screenplay and no effort made to disguise it. Like a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ film with the wit excised and the budget slashed, ‘Clash of the Titans’ insists on grandiloquence with its booming score, visceral editing, and heroic one-liners, but at root is just a bunch of lazy actors standing around on a surprisingly small set made out of black flint (always black flint: the production designer is so in love black flint he even makes a character out of it).

Big stars in it for the cash like Fiennes and Liam Neeson (who, with ‘The A-Team’ also on the horizon, has clearly decided it’s time to pay off the mortgage on his Miami beach-house) make no impression at all, and are not assisted by frankly stupid costuming and staging as Olympian-in-name-only deities. It’s left to Mads Mikkelson to steal what little show there is with his veteran soldier Draco, a man who seems just as confused by the placing of Worthington’s dull Perseus centre-stage as the audience is. Proclaiming himself a fisherman, not a fighter, Perseus demonstrates this by returning to camp in the middle of the woods with a mite of a fish, sourced from an unseen body of water, and clearly not enough to feed a single one of the seven or eight grown men he accompanies. “You are a fisherman!” exclaims a comrade, worryingly without sarcasm.

It’s worth praising, briefly, the presence of Gemma Arterton and Alexa Davalos, both women with far more magnetism and class than the Rachel Weisz’s and Kate Beckinsale’s of this world, even if the narrative continually positions them as either passively ineffectual or prostituted sacrifices/sex objects (none more so than in Arterton’s offensive final deus ex machina). I also feel compelled to mention the presence of Danny Huston as Poseidon, who is given one sole line of dialogue before wisely getting the hell out of dodge – is this last-minute re-editing, ridiculously over-starry casting, or just the actions of a confused casting director?

The best acting comes, surprisingly, from a terribly CGI’d Medusa, whose look of disappointment when she realises she cannot turn one of her victims into stone with her gaze is genuinely touching. Then the victim activates some sort of grenade in his heart (or something) and I lost interest again. Speaking of the special effects, there is alas too little space here to bemoan the worst animatronics on film for some time (the ferryman of the underworld deserves better), the ridiculous-looking stygian witches (who don’t even pass their one eye between them, which is the whole point) and the generally sub-par digital landscapes and creatures. As to the 3-D, greedily added in post-production to ride ‘Avatar’s dimensional wave, I took the advice of the reviewosphere and saw it in 2-D and so could not comment (I urge you to go me one better, and not see the film in any dimensions at all).

Maybe – just maybe – ‘Clash of the Titans’ gets a passing grade as a basic action picture. But it squanders the possibility of making an epic spectacle of Hesiod’s Theogony, failing on every level to capture even the most basic enticements of mythical narrative: there are none of the overlapping genealogies, dense soap-opera-like back-stories or pungently tragic trajectories that make even a glancing read of the Dummies Guide to Ancient Greek Myth an intriguing experience.

As the gang enter Medusa’s lair to Perseus’ bark of “Let’s go kill that bitch” the movie suddenly reveals what it should have been: a sweary, cleavage-filled, lad-oriented adventure. Severed heads, illogical plotting, a fierce distrust of all things feminine – the ingredients are all there. Instead, like the gods who were fooled by Prometheus into accepting the bones and skin of sacrificed animals while men received all the meat, the audience is tricked into swallowing down a pile of unwanted and foul-stenching cast-offs.