Why am I suddenly so obsessed with the fallout of a film gone from the public consciousness ten years now? Maybe it's me recently finishing the first season of Blood of Zeus on Netflix and seeing so clearly what Clash of the Titans very nearly was. Maybe it's my evolving thoughts on the Percy Jackson movies and the forthcoming Disney+ series inevitably taking me back to early 2010 when the first film was released which was, after all, around the time Clash of the Titans came out. Maybe recalling that time when our worst fear about movie theaters was the 3D craze helps me make sense of the modern panic over whether or not theaters will survive at all in a post-pandemic world. I don't know, but here we are ...
History, Production, and Influence
After the overwhelming success of Star Wars, Hollywood experienced a renewed interest in old-timey fantasy adventures. This resulted in films like Dragonslayer, The Beastmaster, and Excalibur. This phase died out as sci-fi thrillers a la The Terminator became the dominant mode of entertainment, and Dragonslayer and company mostly faded into the recesses of cult-followings. Generally the most well-favored of these films was 1981’s Clash of the Titans.
The 1981 film tracks Perseus, the demigod son of Zeus, and the Olympic obstacles he encounters as he sets out to prove his mettle. This will lead him to rescue and fall in love with the princess, Andromeda, and journey to the Underworld to take the head of Medusa, whose devastating power can turn the Kraken to stone.
The movie hits all the beats of the classic myth but rearranges them to fit into a film narrative structure and fills in the blanks with little inventions of its own. In the original story, for example, Perseus is sent to kill Medusa as part of a doomed mission from his malicious step-father, and on his way back home he finds Andromeda chained on the rocks, all ready to be sacrificed, and figures, “Well I’m already here so I might as well ...” and uses Medusa’s head to petrify the sea monster. In the film, Perseus has already formed a relationship with Andromeda before the goddess Thetis demands the princess’s sacrifice, and he sets out to slay Medusa specifically to save her from being sacrificed to the sea-monster, here named “The Kraken.”
In a pre-Spielberg, pre-Avatar, pre-Harry Potter world, high-fantasy film adventures like this came not from computer animation but from stop-motion artists like Ray Harryhausen, famous for his stop-motion work on films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and It Came from Beneath the Sea. A lot of Harryhausen’s best works would be brought to life here in this film—Medusa, Pegasus, The Kraken, etc.
Still, by the ’80s, stop-motion was already dated, and audiences didn't care too much for the film itself. As a reference, Clash of the Titans opened the same year (the same weekend, actually) as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that movie went on to gross $160 M while “Titans” coughed up $30 M. Reviews for “Titans” were tepid with most critics seeing cheese where the filmmakers wanted them to see whimsy.
Just so, the film did find something of a following in later generations through television and VHS. 1980’s audiences wrote it off as being out of touch and out of date, but more time only enriched its appeal. The very same aged quality of the film that alienated its original audience only endeared it to children of the Spielberg age simply because it felt like this relic from another time.
Much of what critics called “cheesy” could just as easily be described as boldness. There’s something about how straight Laurence Olivier plays a line like “Find and fulfill your destiny,” that feels timeless. Even today, the movie is by no means universally beloved, but it knows what it's going for, and it marches to its own drum unabashed. I bring this up because it touches on how this film works where the remake doesn't. Where the remake is very much at war with itself, the original film commits to a tone and style and relishes it.I know a lot of Gen-Xers with a deep love for the film who just kind of assume that this movie was this treasured gem of 1980s cinema when in fact the film was kind of a joke. I don’t say this smugly, I think my nostalgic friends have a better measure of the film’s merit than 1980’s critics ever did. What 1959 Sleeping Beauty is for fairy tales, this movie is for Greek mythology. There was still love to be had for this movie--it was only a matter of time before someone thought to cash in on it in that special way that only Hollywood knows how to do.
Concept Art by Aaron Sims |
Director of The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk, Louis Leterrier urged his agent to get him onto the project as soon as the director’s slot opened. Leterrier was a part of that generation that fell in love with the 1981 film, and naturally he coveted the chance to direct a remake of the film the way many of us wish we could make a Star Wars movie. Here was a chance for a grown-up fanboy to project his favorite action figures onto the playing board of photorealistic, widescreen visual effects.
But the game had changed in the thirty years since Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans. That old-timey whimsy that eventually endeared audiences to Harryhausen? That worked then (kind of), but Hollywood isn't really in the business of making movies that will eventually be appreciated. They wanted a movie that would speak to this moment.
As such, there are a couple of foundational differences between the 2010 remake and its 1981 ancestor. Most significant is the shift in tone and aesthetic. The remake swaps the grand orchestral sweeps for the electric guitar, whimsy for rage. Even Pegasus here is a hardcore Pegasus, sporting a midnight black coat in contrast to his standard angel-white coloring. This is Clash of the Titans for the Die Hard crowd.
This is where the movie loses a lot of people before they've even seen the movie. We've sort of collectively adopted a mindset toward unapologetic action flicks. If it looks like a movie your Uncle Larry and his truck driver friends would like, how good could it be, right? A lot of decent movies are written off like that simply because there's no chance of them ever receiving an Oscar.
There are, of course, counterexamples to this thinking. You naturally have your Independence Days and whatnot, but even 1975's Jaws is revered not only by casual film viewers but also academic circles as well. This is interesting because when you look at the writing and plotting, it's not a remarkably complex film compared to something like Vertigo, but this only ends up revealing the film's strengths.
I'll use the characters as an example: Brody, Hooper, and Quint don't come with a lot of backstory. They broadly fit into three different approaches to combatting Amity Island's shark problem: Brody representing the law, Hooper representing science, and Quint representing firsthand experience, but these are not fully fleshed out characters. We get the idea, for example, that Quint is kind of a bit of a nuisance on Amity Island, but there's no expectation from the audience to learn about how exactly he became such a curmudgeon. We just accept that he is here to help us take the fight to the shark and also to antagonize the science nerd. The closest thing we get to backstory with any of them is the context of Brody and his family being new to the community he is supposed to protect. This adds a kind of charge to his eventual victory over the shark, but it plays little part in directly removing the threat.
Either way, it's not the characters that everyone really talks about. It's the shark, and the sheer gumption it took 29-year-old Steven to make such a technically challenging film. Understanding the inner lives of the protagonists is only useful to the audience insomuch as it furthers the audience's ability to participate in this conflict. The story of Jaws is very straightforward, but because its parts are so well-engineered, you can still (ahem) sink your teeth into it. You can track the narrative progression. You can read all sorts of metaphor into it. A film like Jaws can be nominated for Best Picture.
Comparing Clash of the Titans to something like Jaws is like comparing a sandcastle to Mt. Rushmore, but what I'm getting at is that it is more important for a film, especially a mass appeal film, to be coherent than complex. This is where a lot of films that think they are following the tracks of something like Jaws fall short. Where Clash of the Titans succeeds, it's because there is some kind of backbone supporting the action. Where it fails, it's because its parts are refusing to congeal.
Let's start by looking where Clash of the Titans succeeds.
This Movie Almost Works
The movie’s reimagining of Greek mythology is wholly exciting for someone who loves watching Greek mythology. The Medusa encounter is refitted as a thrilling chase throughout her dungeon, which itself is this contorted jungle-gym of fire and stone full of secret corners for Medusa to hide in. The choice of giving her a snake body is actually inherited from the ’81 depiction of her. (Reportedly Harryhausen found it much easier to animate a snake’s tail than clothing.) 2010 Medusa rolls with that and adds a new dimension where her face takes on a reptilian form in the moment she petrifies her victims. The monsters in this movie are fun, but it's really how this film plays the gods that makes the film worth a second thought.
This remake takes to heart the prophetic fears expressed by Maggie Smith's Thetis at the end of the 1981 film. What would happen to the gods if men grew too restless? If men outgrew the gods? Bitter against the gods and their mistreatment, the humans in this film have begun starving the gods of their prayers in an act of open rebellion. Zeus tries to frighten the mortals back into the temples by enlisting the help of Hades, despite all the other gods telling him that’s a terrible idea. Perseus becomes involved in this conflict when his adopted family is caught in the crossfires of one of these mortal-Olympian confrontations and killed. And when Hades demands the sacrifice of Princess Andromeda to the Kraken, Perseus takes on the mission to kill the Kraken and stick it to the gods once and for all.
This is the story of a powerless people seeking to push back against the forces that oppress them, and the film's conflict poses a question about the nature of willpower: when something powerful flexes its might (e.g. a god literally demanding "feed your princess to the monster or we'll level your city") is sheer determination and virtue enough to tell them "no!"?
This represents a unique inner conflict for Perseus who, despite growing up in the mud with the mortals, discovers he carries in him the blood of the very gods he blames for killing his family. Perseus tries so hard to disavow his godly ties because he does not want to become corrupt as they are. This leads to things like him refusing to use the not-a-lightsaber given to him by Zeus. It's not enough for Perseus to cheat using his godly powers to get what he wants--that's what the gods would do to those they oppress--he wants to do it right.
But Perseus instead draws strength from the fellowship that he forms with the men of his company. His fight against injustice stems more from a desire to protect the helpless than to do harm to those who have wronged him (at least in Leterrier's vision, and we'll get to that). It is because of his faith in mankind and brotherhood that he proves himself the hero he needs to be.
The Great Retooling
Let me disclose up and front I am decidedly not on the Avatar hate-train. I actually really like the film, having already devoted one essay to defending the movie, but it’s hard to circumvent how Avatar’s success set this Clash of the Titans up for failure. Or rather, how the way Warner Bros. reacted to Avatar’s success set this film up for failure.
In December of 2009, right when Avatar’s 3D wonderland was earning rave reviews and bounteous box-office, Warner Bros announced that Clash of the Titans would be converted into 3D and its release date would be pushed back a week (one whole week ...) to accommodate this reshuffling. By this time, Leterrier’s movie was already well into post-production, having already released a teaser trailer. At the time, this seemed ambitious. Later, it would just seem suicidal.
But the 3D nonsense is only half the story because Warner Brothers didn’t just order a 3D paint-job. The studio also ordered reshoots for roughly a quarter of the film. Reshoots that would significantly alter the narrative of the film. With less than four months until the film’s premiere.
The exact reasons for these reshoots are still kind of ambiguous, Warner Bros has never given their side of the story. Many of the deleted scenes from Leterrier's original cut have found their way onto the internet, and from what I've seen of them, they seemed like perfectly releasable material. It doesn't seem like one of those situations where the original cut just wasn't good. All we know is that these reshoots happened in tandem with the plans to repurpose the film for 3D. One presumes they just wanted to maximize the movie's wide appeal and didn't trust Leterrier's original draft would do that for them for some reason.
I can see the logic behind some of these story changes, and had the original script been designed with these plotpoints in mind, maybe they could have worked. But in the finished film, they just feel like intrusions and only sabotage this movie at every turn.
Story Changes
Io's backstory is that she declined the sexual advances of an unspecified god and was cursed with agelessness. She then spends her immortal existence searching for a way to bridge the divide between gods and man, a bridge she finds in Perseus. She is killed by Calibos just before the final showdown, sort of sealing her mission with her life and finally granting her release from her mortal chains, but the studio had Io resurrected by Zeus in the last twenty seconds of the film so Perseus can have his trophy woman.
The splicing perhaps accounts for the uneven romantic tension between the characters. Actress Gemma Arterton had the awkward job of playing Perseus’ mother figure in one scene and his lover in the next. (That’s Oedipus you’re thinking of, Warner Brothers, not Perseus!) Arterton was especially annoyed over the film’s inconsistency, and when the studio asked her to return for the sequel, she basically just gave them the stink-eye and slammed the door.
Zeus’ character was another casualty of the reshoots. The initial vision played Zeus as a power-hungry tyrant with fewer shades of conflict. In the studio cut, Perseus and Zeus end their relationship with a heart-to-heart where Zeus offers some fatherly counsel about not letting power go to his head. In Leterrier’s original ending, Perseus flies up to Olympus on Pegasus and confronts Zeus for his treachery, disavowing his ties to him and asserting that his real father was a mortal and promising to kick his butt in the sequel.
Sympathetic Zeus is the one revision I actually almost wish had been in Leterrier’s original vision. Dynamic characters are just more interesting than static characters, and after Zeus’ little experiment with Hades backfired so spectacularly, a change of heart feels like a more natural conclusion. Mostly I just think that a reconciliatory final scene with Zeus and Perseus is more complex and adult than ending the film with a scowling contest.
Moreover, even Leterrier’s original iteration goes out of its way to expose megalomania and pride in the mortals, so it doesn’t make sense to blame Zeus for all the corruption in the cosmos. (This also contradicts Io's mission of peace, leaving me to suspect Leterrier might have had plans to eventually redeem Zeus in a later film.) Anger against the gods who starve fishermen families and rape temple priestesses is understandable, but the unspoken irony in this film is that, given a modicum of power, the mortals are just as bad as the gods.
King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia leave their subjects cold and hungry while they drown in gold and luxury. King Acrisius literally throws his wife and her child into the ocean just to get back at Zeus for humiliating him. The only person of power in this film to escape this trap is Princess Andromeda, who sneaks out of the palace to feed the impoverished citizens whom her parents neglect. It isn’t necessarily godhood specifically that makes a person evil in this universe—it’s power and wealth of any degree. Hence, Perseus will do anything to avoid nurturing his godly connection. A more nuanced view of power and morality would be a more natural extension of the film’s philosophy.
And yeah, I hear you all sniggering at me trying to glean meaning from this film like it’s some Ingmar Bergman feature and not popcorn fodder. But even if the director did just want to mindlessly slap together a mess of explosions with no philosophical agenda, ideology has an odd way of sneaking up on both the filmmaker and the film viewer. Just because you don’t acknowledge ideology, that doesn’t mean it’s not there or that it can’t influence the viewer, and that makes it worth studying. Anyways ...
Just so, sympathetic Zeus wasn’t in Leterrier’s original vision, and the rewritten product feels more discordant for it. If Zeus and Perseus’ reconciliation at the end doesn’t quite feel earned at the end, it’s because swapping out a few moving parts doesn’t make a whole new machine.
But there's one change that I think demonstrates why these reshoots were both detrimental and shallow: the garbling of Perseus' motivations. Why does Perseus do the things he does?
Let's refer back to the film's conflict and theme: If the conflict is between the indomitable will of the gods and the vital spirit of the mortals, the theme could be that when the powerless are oppressed, good people have not only the moral obligation to fight back but also the ability to come out on top.
Perseus in the original cut fell very in line with that way of thinking: he embarked on the quest to save Andromeda from being sacrificed and the kingdom from being slaughtered because he didn't believe that anyone should have to die just to please the gods. Basically, he set out to save the city because that's what heroes do. But apparently that wasn't good enough for Warner Bros.
The Wreckage
The film still brought in the big bucks on April 2nd, 2010, but everyone else paid a high price for this movie’s success.
Lead actor Sam Worthington got pushback for his performance with many calling into question whether or not he had any business leading a movie. When you watch the film, you see that he’s actually about on par with what one expects from your standard action flick. No one chides John Wayne’s performance in The Sons of Katie Elder for not being “Gregory Peck” enough. The rage was mostly the internet taking its revenge on Worthington for having dared to star in Avatar, which we had barely decided was “just the woooorst.”
Hacksaw Ridge (2016) |
Because if we’re being honest, no one was done worse by this film than Leterrier who got sidelined at his own party. Leterrier has voiced his dissatisfaction with the finished film, especially the 3D conversion. He reported to The Huffington Post in 2013, “It was famously rushed and famously horrible. It was absolutely horrible, the 3D. Nothing was working, it was just a gimmick to steal money from the audience.”
More than once in the ten years since the movie’s release, I’ve gone back to this movie ready for some low-demand entertainment, but I always come out feeling much sadder than I’d anticipated. Not because the movie is as bad as IMDb says, but because I can never not see the genuine sparks of potential in this film.
Watching Clash of the Titans, listening to Leterrier and Warner Bros. singing two different songs on top of each other, you don't really know what you're watching. And when you come out only feeling confused, what is there to do but write it off as just another brainless blockbuster? And what can we do except stare at the rubble and wonder, "what if?"
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ReplyDeleteGreat analysis, and some wonderful one liners, like this one: "This leads to things like him refusing to use the not-a-lightsaber given to him by Zeus." Loved that, and several other lines. I thinkbyour analysis is spot on! The movie could have been great, but really missed the mark on several levels. Love your reviews!
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