DEEP/DIVE – Clash of the Titans (2010)

Clash of the Titans

Greetings all and welcome to DEEP/DIVE: Film Bunker’s newest (and greatest) editorial series! Join us for a somewhat regular column, where we will skewer, dissect and gleefully over-analyse a wide selection of fine films without any real need for doing so, because ‘The Internet’. Said films may be approaching, or have surpassed, a particular retrospective milestone. They may have penetrated the cultural zeitgeist in a way that demands increased attention from neurotic and/or caffeine-riddled critics. Or they might just have, like, really dank memes. Whatever the reason, Film Bunker is ready to wade through a sea of hot takes and pop-up browser tabs in order to take the plunge.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

Released: April 02, 2010 (US)

Directed by: Louis Leterrier

Runtime: 108 minutes

As a critic, it’s hard to conceive of and write an overwhelmingly negative review. Well, at least harder than you would imagine. Sure, we all love to read an excellent critical take-down or savage hit-piece on an item of media. And, deep down, I genuinely believe that this is why deplorable things like Married at First Sight or Post Malone exist at all: schadenfreude is real, and people have a distinct and palpable yearning for trash culture.

Now, in saying this, I also think it’s perfectly reasonable to enjoy media that falls into the under-appreciated, ‘So Bad, It’s Good’ category. As FilmBunker’s own Ciaran Kerr said in her passionate defence of the critically-panned Robin Hood (2018), titled ‘Why Robin Hood Isn’t Actually THAT Bad’: “Is the film good? Oh, definitely not. It is a trope-laden, visual mess with too much slow-mo and a dash of terrible CGI. It was a stupid, dumb movie that I loved wholeheartedly.” However, for me, when a film lands in the ‘So Bad, I’m Questioning My Sanity and Re-thinking My Will To Live’ category… well, that’s a different story entirely, which brings us to the glorious train wreck that is Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans (2010).

Looking back on the years leading up to 2010, we find plenty of evidence to support a wholesale desire within the industry at the time to ‘bounce back’ bigger, harder, and stronger than ever before: the wild success of gritty comic-book adaptations like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009), which appeared concurrent with Marvel’s Iron Man (2008), and in turn helped to kickstart Phase One of the MCU; loose reboots of media franchises like Fast & Furious and Terminator (to admittedly mixed results); new runaway media such as The Hangover and the Twilight saga; alongside additions to established cinematic series like Transformers and Harry Potter.

However, the event most noticeable for this period, the one which became both seismic and paradigmatic in terms of immediate shock and prolonged impact, was the release and unexpected triumph of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Although the film is entirely worthy of its own DEEP/DIVE skewering, and with all rigorous critical analysis aside, it’s plausible enough to assert that Avatar was and remains a huge financial success, a global cinematic juggernaut, and a phenomenon that irrevocably changed the face of the modern film industry.

Up until the advent of Avengers: Endgame (2019), Avatar held the coveted position as the highest-grossing film worldwide for nearly a decade; the film remains the second highest-grossing movie of all time (when adjusted for inflation against Gone with the Wind (1939), with a staggering total of more than $3 billion). As an epic sci-fi adventure film, Avatar defied traditional genre conventions by being nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. And if life ever returns to normal for us in this barren and listless post-COVID hellscape world, we may be treated to not one, not two, but four (!) Avatar sequels (rumoured for release sometime in the next decade).

Reading all of this, you may be wondering: ‘Okay… And your point is?’ Two words, dear reader: Sam Worthington. See, 2010 was also a strange time for Hollywood due to the inexplicable rise of the Aussie actor as a burgeoning A-list star and overnight action hero. Pre-2008, Worthington was a solid if somewhat unremarkable homegrown talent with a steady-stream of commendable performances in domestic films, such as the mob-heist flick Getting’ Square (2003), the intense character drama Somersault (2004), and the crocodilian creature feature Rogue (2007). Then, somewhere in the period between late 2009-early 2010, worldwide audiences were suddenly treated to nine months of Hollywood big-ticket features which propped Worthington up, front-and-centre, as a major blockbuster commodity. He had a supporting role alongside Christian Bale in McG’s Terminator Salvation (2009), followed by a lead turn as the reluctant human-solider-come-alien-guerrilla-leader in Cameron’s indomitable Avatar, and lastly, a stint as the Greek demigod Perseus in Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans (2010).

On paper, a film like Clash of the Titans should have been an easy winner. The story focuses on characters from Greek mythology, dealing with well-worn archetypes and conventional tropes. As a film adaptation, it also has existing precedent in the form of Desmond Davis’ 1981 film of the same name, which was financially successful for its time and gathered a minor cult following which continues to this very day. Even culturally, given the success of media series’ like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (and prospectively, Game of Thrones), high-fantasy blockbusters are (mostly) a sure-thing, and the audience demand is baked-in.

So, if all of the above points check out, why then was Clash of the Titans such an abject failure of titanic proportions? Well, first, let’s assess the counter-argument. The film was an outright financial success, with a $493 million box office haul off of a modest $125 million budget and, in many ways, this is the only metric that truly matters in Hollywood. So much so that, given an utterly dismal critical reception (the film holds 23% and 40% scores on Rotten Tomatoes for critics and audiences respectively), the box office return for the film justified the development and release of a direct (and also awful) sequel, Wrath of the Titans (2012). In truth, the real reason Clash of the Titans sucks so hard comes down to a laundry list of bafflingly bad filmmaking decisions, resulting in a dizzying and intensely dull film that is very much the cumulative shitty sum of its equally shitty parts.

These bad filmmaking decisions generally fall into two problems areas: artistic versus aesthetic. The most obvious takeaway from watching Clash of the Titans is the dreadful acting on display. Looking at the cast, this seems unlikely at face-value, considering the presence of A-list talent like Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Mads Mikkelsen, etc. As Roger Ebert noted in his surprisingly positive review of the film:

“I like this kind of stuff. I don’t say it’s good cinema, although I recognize the craftsmanship that went into it. I don’t say it’s good acting, when the men have so much facial hair they all look like Liam Neeson. I like the energy, the imagination, the silliness. I even like the one guy who doesn’t have a beard. That’s Perseus.”

Goofy star-power aside, everyone in this film delivers wooden, lifeless and utterly unremarkable performances, making for painfully flat dialogue-heavy moments and endless cavalcades of leaden exposition. However, Worthington-as-Perseus is by far the worst offender here, coming off as a veritable black hole of on-screen charisma. It’s hard to put into words the exact feeling of jarring dislocation one feels watching the Aussie soap star from Love My Way fumble through scene after scene of epic Greek god conversation, while navigating the mythical worlds of giant creatures and otherworldly beings, without even trying to hide his very noticeable Sydney accent. At least in Avatar, Worthington got away with being motion-captured as a “bluish-green 7’ 3” tail having ass thing” for 80% of his screen-time, encouraging a healthy suspension of disbelief. No such luck here, I’m afraid. Even Neeson, Fiennes, Mikkelsen, that one dude who played the Onion Knight in Game of Thrones, and Gemma Arterton as ‘Hot Chick in a Skirt but Also a Cursed Immortal or Something and Oh, She’s Also the Narrator Too’ cannot distract from it.

Story-wise, the script is a complete mess; however, it’s what we’ve come to expect from a film that was in production hell for the better part of a decade, with half a dozen different writers and directors attached to the project (even Lawrence Kasdan of Star Wars fame couldn’t salvage it). The main plot boils down to regular Joe fisherman Perseus (Worthington) discovering that he’s also (surprise!) the son of Zeus (Neeson), who must now quest to the Underworld of Hades to defeat the Kraken, a gorgon set upon the human world as part of a primordial power struggle between the Gods of Olympus—confused yet? Good. For a film that barely scrapes in with two hours in runtime, the embodied experience of actually watching it becomes a waking eternity. The pacing meanders all over the map, overflowing with pointless detours, battles, group montages and side plots, all to pervert Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey into an Ouroboros strange loop of pain, regret and suffering.

There’s also no easy way to say it folks, but aesthetically, Clash of the Titans is just straight-up ugly to look at—as in total eye-sore, hurts my brain, ‘Please God make it stop!’ ugly. And given the bright visual palette of Avatar, the contrast of otherworldly Worthington’s makes this lack even more striking. As the plot devolves into a series of mediocre quests, the camera lingers over craggy rockfaces, badly lit caverns, stock photo mountain vistas and awful CGI backdrops. Even the appearance of set-piece boss fights with Medusa and the Kraken can’t save Leterrier’s haphazard, lack-lustre direction style. The action scenes are entirely devoid of coherent geography and suitably hard to follow, emblematic of the period’s affinity for disastrous shaky cam. Combine all of this with colour grading that makes everything look like it’s either covered in soot from Mount Vesuvius or the interior of a Saudi prince’s toilet, and you have the cinematic equivalent of a run-of-the-mill Gods of War RPG cut scene.

Ultimately, as much as I adore and respect Ebert’s love for film criticism, he was completely wrong about this one. Fun, goofy camp this is not. As Peter Travers wrote for Rolling Stone, Clash of the Titans is “mythically dull, dragass and devoid of wit…. with good actors going for the paycheck and using beards and heavy makeup to hide their shame.” As the legend tells it, Medusa’s head was prized because staring into its serpentine maw would turn a person into stone. And friends, the very same could be said for watching this abysmal film.

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