The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Clash of the Titans

  Anyone else remember the year we spent wondering if we would ever again see a movie that wasn't coming out in 3D?

    That surge in 3D films in the early months of 2010 led to a number of questionable executive decisions. We saw a lot of films envisioned as standard film experiences refitted into the 3D format at the eleventh hour. In the ten years since, 3D stopped being profitable because audiences quickly learned the difference between a film that was designed with the 3D experience in mind and the brazen imitators. Perhaps the most notorious victim of this trend was the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans.

      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 ... 

       Like many films released in the spring and summer of 2010, Clash of the Titans was not conceived as a 3D viewing experience. Warner Bros ordered its conversion into 3D amidst post-production in December 2009. When the film finally premiered on April 2, 2010, critics like Slate's Daniel Engber described the film as a "washed-out, dimly lit, cardboard-looking mess of a motion picture." The gamble did not pay off, and Clash of the Titans joined the Michael Bay "Transformers" franchise as the poster child for big-budget movies desecrating the halls of cinema.

   I'm not trying to gloat when I say this. I actually lament it. Because at the end of the day, this movie's legacy won't even be kickstarting the parade of awful attempts at 3D. Clash of the Titans stands more as a monument to the devastation wrought by corporate interference, a testament that no degree of cheese is as poisonous as the artistic indifference of executive meddling.

Let's talk about the movie Clash of the Titans nearly was.

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

        There was talk of remaking the film as far back as the early 2000s. The earliest concepts reportedly drew upon multiple brands of mythology (not a far stretch since the ’81 film borrows the name “The Kraken” from Norse mythology), but Warner Bros. eventually decided to mostly stick with Olympian folklore. (Mostly. The Djinn from Islamic mythology do sneak into the finished product.)

         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 why the film has the trappings of a good story and why the finished film still succeeds where it does: like Jaws, it has a strong conflict. The opposition and stakes are clear, the scope is grand (titanic, you might say), and the connection to the real world rings true. Again, the gods of Greek mythology are a very fitting metaphor for the rich and powerful of the 21st century.

    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.

    And this is another part of the movie that I find tragically underdiscussed: as in most of what we would call "good cinema," a lot of this film's moving parts aren't just incidental. They form the basis of not just the external conflict of the plot, but the internal conflict of the characters. Perseus seeing his working-class family killed, almost incidentally, by the machinations of the powerful things in his world, and then learning that he carries this same dormant gene within him is an unnerving development. It presents the frightening possibility that, given time and circumstance, Perseus might become just the thing he hates the most. And even in this film's compromised finished version, the story tracks that line closely as Perseus decides he's going to navigate both his potential for greatness and his very real feelings of anger.

Compare Perseus to other characters who have been wronged by Zeus. Characters like Hades and Calibos, a disfigured mortal king fallen from grace after he rebelled against Zeus, seek to rise up against Zeus out of a desire for vengeance.

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.

    

       This thematic throughline is ironically why the film never stood a chance critically. It’s too lowbrow for the audience to ever take it seriously, but it’s just barely sincere enough that you wish you could.

    Clash of the Titans was never going to be "good" in the same vein as The Shawshank Redemption or Cinema Paradiso, but it may have been "good" like Independence Day. Yet Uncle Larry doesn’t bring this movie up at the family reunion the way he does Independence Day. That's because for all this movie has going for it in theory, the finished result just doesn't live up to its potential. For that, we can blame another 3D epic from the winter of 2010 starring Sam Worthington.

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.

         I guess we’ll never know for certain to what degree the film’s 3D poisoned its overall reception. I myself never saw the 3D cut. Watching the film years later, the film feels neither revelatory nor offensive. The worst I can say about it is that it’s service-level, but I also have the benefit of watching it without my perception stained by the memory of Liam Neeson’s beard disembodied from its Neeson. 

    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

       Leterrier’s original cut followed both the myth and the ’81 original by having Perseus romantically linked with Princess Andromeda. The reshoots paired Perseus with Io, a character who did not appear in the '81 film or the myth of Perseus (though she does share the name of one of Zeus's many lovers from mythology, I think the one he turned into a cow because of "love" ...).

    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 warping of Io's character is perhaps the starkest example of the film taking a good thing and ruining it by making it into something it isn't. Io's function in this story is like an NPC guide for our main character. She relays exposition about the world of gods and monsters, but she also helps Perseus navigate his feelings of anger for the gods. She's in a unique position to do so because like Perseus, and like many of the characters within the film, Io has been wronged by the gods. But unlike Calibos or Hades, she believes a peaceful reconciliation is what's needed, not more needless destruction. She's there to teach Perseus a lesson about choosing goodness over vengeance. She looks like an Arwen, but her role is closer to that of a Gandalf. 

    And I'm not saying Perseus needed to end up with Andromeda in this film just because she's the princess. After all, Perseus and Andromeda share less screentime here than in the '81 film, and so their relationship doesn't have as much time to develop. But even Leterrier's original ending didn't have them walking down the aisle. After Perseus pulls Andromeda from the water, they share a kiss, then he says he may come back after he's done doing some hero stuff. It's the kind of thing where the romance isn't consummated, but you clearly see the seeds planted. 

    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.

       The other Olympian gods played a larger role in Leterrier’s original vision. This would have made for a fuller cast of immortals. Apollo and Athena in particular would have been given more screentime, with Zeus picking up a lot of the scenes that would have been given to Apollo. (e.g. Apollo originally gave Perseus the coin for passage to the Underworld.) One imagines that rounding up all twelve Olympians for the reshoots would have been too much of a hassle, so many of the scenes that would have featured the full cast of gods now have just Zeus and Hades. Olympic-sized turmoil was truncated down to Zeus and Hades' sibling rivalry.

        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 studio cut had the film really lean into Perseus' revenge quest and made that his primary motivation. The finished film adds a (really confusing) caveat to Hades' power where if Perseus kills the Kraken, Hades will then be weak enough for Perseus to strike a deadly blow at him, and that is what motivates Perseus to set out to defeat the Kraken. Saving the innocent masses is just a means to a very selfish end.

    I'm not saying that Perseus shouldn't have been angry. Anger is a natural emotion and one of the phases of grief, but there's something insidious and even revealing about Warner Bros trying to make the hero more palatable to middle-school boys by pumping him full of rage to mask his nobility. It capitulates to a rather cynical worldview absent of altruism while giving its audience permission to believe the same.

    Really, what it looks like is that Warner Bros just decided that Leterrier's movie was too sappy simply because it had a baseline modicum of respect for storytelling. It dared to imagine that the reasons why people even come to the movies sometimes has to do with more than banal explosions and monsters crashing into each other. This makeover didn't happen, as originally reported, because certain things "just weren't working." It was the studio pandering to an audience it didn't think much of to begin with.

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)

        This film’s tepid reception likely contributed to his spotlight from Avatar dying out. Hence why he isn’t a household name like any of the Marvel Chrises despite having just starred in the highest-grossing film ever made. Even so, Worthington’s had a steady stream of indie and small-studio films to work on in the intervening decade, many of which I’ve liked him in, and he’s got four Avatar sequels coming up, so I don’t know how burnt he is over the matter.

        Warner Brothers eventually reaped the fruits of their meddling in Clash of the Titans when they released a sequel in 2012, Wrath of the Titans. This follow-up was received even worse than the 2010 film both critically and financially. People were curious enough to see the 2010 film, but when that turned out to be rather unremarkable, their brand loyalty died like a puff of smoke. The sequel isn’t without interesting concepts (how do a demigod superhero's motivations change when he becomes a single-dad?) but it’s lacking in cohesion or thoughtfulness that would have no doubt been readily supplied by someone like Leterrier whose love for the project was only too clear and only too wasted.

    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.”

        Leterrier had spoken early on in promotional material about having plans for a Clash of the Titans trilogy, but he was frustrated by the men in suits leaving their grimy fingerprints all over his labor of love and walked away from the franchise. He further lamented, “I’m a good boy and I rolled with the punches and everything, but it’s not my movie. ‘Clash of the Titans’ is not my movie. And ultimately that’s why I didn’t do the sequel.”

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.

        Much in the same way some critics let their view of the film be swayed because it was “just another blockbuster,” the studio underestimated how even blockbusters are more than just explosions and monsters. In trying to maximize this film's profitability, Warner Bros played to the worst assumptions about the film and its target audience. That kind of thinking gets you short-term gains (the movie made some decent money for Warner Brothers) but has long-term pitfalls (Warner Bros didn’t get their trilogy). Turns out people will notice the difference if you neglect or foil the film’s narrative backbone.

*The sound I make thinking about this movie*

   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?"

                --The Professor