04-08-10 Movie Review:  Clash of the Titans

Three days of noncommercial begin tonight at 7 in the Orpheum with The Great Muppet Caper, with Kermit and company in pursuit of jewel thieves in London: 7 tonight, Orpheum. Tomorrow at 7:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway is showing Werner Herzog’s Fitzcaldo, the story of a real wingnut who is determined to lug a whole steamship overland in order to set up an opera house in the jungles of Peru: 7:30 tomorrow, Murdock. And Saturday is the big event, a feature movie written and directed by Eagle movie reviewer Ron Pocowatchit called The Dead Can’t Dance, in which three Kansans discover that something is killing literally everybody but them and one man they meet along the road to college. The Dead Can’t Dance shows Saturday night at 7:30 in the Orpheum.

And commercially, for your sins, you can go see Clash of the Titans.

Leonard Maltin’s 2010 Movie Guide condemned to 1981 original as fit only for the kiddies, and three writers and director Louis Leterrier, who made The Incredible Hulk just two years ago, don’t make it anything better.

Special effects and sets are all very well, but not particularly impressive in this day of computer generation, and the special effect that should be most impressive, the fearful kraken, looks to me like the Incredible Hulk crossed with the Creature from the Black Lagoon with an extra tentacle, blown up to the size of a good-sized town but never very clearly shown as a whole. The giant scorpions are much better, but are also clearly homages to Ray Harryhausen, and Medusa’s snakes for hoir are good enough that I could have done with a lot more of them.

Settings are mostly apparently old Roman ruins, anachronistically shown a long time before Rome existed, and ranges of mountains consisting of grey bare rock alternating with occasional desert; like too many other pre-Christian epics, Clash of the Titans left me wondering how people found food on such unlikely ground.

Action consists of battles against this monster and that, much less exciting than martial arts, and the customary quest, which covers untold miles without much variance. Since none of the actors took any interest in the characters, I don’t see why we should. Dialogue is little exposition.

Clash of the Titans is supposed to represent a personal war between humanity and the very gods themselves, and as such, it is interesting how little it differs from the old Harryhousen tales of Sinbad, with the villains in this case even more reluctant to adopt human form and fight their own battles. Even their monster’s don’t seem to be anything but great big reptiles and birds and bugs, as if the gods couldn’t do any better than inflate what they have already done in small. Structure is episodic rather than developmental, leading to a disappointing climax.

The Great Muppet Caper, Fitzcarraldo, The Dead Can’t Dance. You can choose Clash of the Titans if you want to. It’s a free country.