Clash of the Titans (2010)
Another year, another re-make. What is it with the movie industry’s obsession with re-making classic films? I can understand the need to re-make bad movies but I never get why there are re-makes of good movies. It is a little insulting, I think, to do this. Anyway, this time around it was Clash of the Titans that was re-made. I will always have great memories of the original Clash of the Titans from 1981 because of the work of Ray Harryhausen. The stop motion monsters and the mechanical owl were brilliant to watch.
The latest version of Clash of the Titans is far less memorable. The producers and writing team seem to have taken everything good about the original and replaced it with blurry action scenes, wooden acting and CGI monsters (albeit, very impressive CGI monsters).
At times, the new version is very nice to look at, the scenes with Medusa especially are very nice, as is the Kraken. However, it isn’t all fantastic. Some of the sets were very dodgy and the photography was hardly spectacular. The aforementioned action scenes were rather frustrating to watch at times as the camera panned in and out and jumped from one angle to the next far too quickly.
The acting was stale and pretty much showed that Gemma Arterton is not much more than a pretty face. Sam Worthington tries to be a lead actor but ultimately fails and Liam Neeson just looks awkward throughout, he fits into the era just about as well as paper towels would.
This movie isn’t terrible, and in parts is actually quite enjoyable, but it falls short of capturing the imagination like the original did. With a better lead cast, this movie could have been a little better, but it suffers more from poor writing than anything else. Clash of the Titans (2010) is the product of a modern world, all style and little substance.