Monday, April 5, 2010

Crap on the Titans

I am so disappointed. I was so looking forward to the Clash of the Titans this year. This is movie is bad, and worse than they say it is. This movie is currently pulling a T-Meter score of 31%, and I am surprised it is that high. At 31%, this movie is overrated. The production team fucked up, from the top to the bottom, they fucked up. Writers, directors, editors, effects teams, they all fucked up. I was pissed when I left the theater.

So where did they go wrong? We should be reminded of Easy Reader's... er... Morgan Freeman's analogy for movie project failure. When asked if he was surprised that "The Bonfire of the Vanities" drowned in a river of blood, he simply nodded his head "no". When asked why he was not surprised, he paused for a moment and said "When an airplane crashes, the most frequent finding of the investigators is that the catastrophe was a result of a series of mishaps along the way."

There certain were a series of mishaps along the way to releasing Clash of the Titans (2010). There were a series of bad decisions that led up to this disaster:
  1. They decided to re-write the myth of Perseus.
  2. They decided to make this a secular humanist polemic of man vs the gods.
  3. They chose a really crappy writer or writers.
  4. The decided to modify Greek mythology to make the Kraken a child of Hades, rather than a Titan imprisoned and controlled by Poseidon.
  5. They decided to go with a coup d'état theme in which Hades wanted to overthrow Zeus.
  6. They chose a French martial arts movie director with little visual effects movie experience.
  7. The crafted an anti-climactic ending in which the Kraken goes down quickly and easily.
  8. They shot this movie in flat 2d and tried to extrapolate a 3d layered film from it. There are no 3d effects worth mentioning in this film.
These are just a few of the problems. There are many more problems, story-wise. The worst problems are found in the editing. There are unforgivable breaks and bad cuts in the action found in this film. One moment they are in a crisis, drowning in a ship wreck, the next moment they are on the beach. No explanation is given. The crisis just ended, and you have no idea why. There are many bad cuts like this found in this film.

Skip it. Skip it entirely. This is a pure waste of time.