Stodgy, overlong, and muddy, "Clash Of The Titans" exists and is celebrated by its admirers as the last cinematic platform for special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. Such loyalty doesn't obscure the fact, more commonly noted in today's CGI age but true in 1981, too, that special effects need to serve an interesting story to be worth seeing at all.
"Clash" isn't interesting. It isn't even coherent. An angry Greek guy stands on a coastline, waves splashing extras as he chews the scenery and exposes his fillings while decrying his daughter's pregnant condition. To bury his shame, he sticks her and her son in a coffin and throws them into the ocean, which carries them to a magical isle where the boy, Perseus, grows into future "L.A. Law" star Harry Hamlin in his early beefcake days. Meanwhile, in an all-white space meant to be Olympus but more like a dentist's waiting room, a cross Zeus played by Lawrence Olivier decides to punish the father's murderous crime by, well, by destroying the father's city and murdering his subjects.
"Release the crappin'!" Zeus cries out.
Actually, that's kraken, a sea creature not part of Greek lore but an early chance for Harryhausen to strut his stuff.
Some movies live on because they are good. "Clash Of The Titans" seems to survive instead on nostalgia, for the Harryhausen aesthetic of Sinbad and Jason and claymation stop-action fight scenes with skeletons when such effects had to be earned with something more than a press of a button. It probably helps to have been young and impressionable when the film came out, geared as it is to a juvenile audience with a robotic owl clearly modeled on that classic Greek demigod R2-D2.
But the action scenes are not terribly gripping; even the Medusa scene praised by many here plays too choppy and inert. There's no interest in the characters; though Hamlin and co-star Judi Bowker are pretty to look at, they are given no more to do than recite threadbare lines with minimal emotion. The gods bicker and utter various profundities, with Olivier looking like he's being filmed between proctology exams and most of the other Olympians standing around looking concerned. Like Jamie Farr in "Scrooged" and Phil Silvers in "The Cheap Detective" Ursula Andress as Aphrodite has star billing and one line of dialogue. Maggie Smith pines for a mutant goat boy while Claire Bloom pines for the days she and Sir Larry worked on "Richard III."
Either director Desmond Davis and screenwriter Beverley Cross were inept, or else they were under strict orders from producer Harryhausen not to do anything interesting that would distract from his effects work. The sets are bare, the outfits plain (togas over jogging shorts), and the secondary characters exist largely to be killed off by Harryhausen's monsters or else cheer when the heroes do something we are supposed to be excited by. Burgess Meredith plays up his wizened-but-puckish persona as a playwright who helps Perseus capture the winged horse Pegasus, then both coot and steed melt into the background.
Greek myth stories have a lot of potential to entertain. They are the oldest surviving form of Western story, after all, and have been passed on a couple dozen centuries already at least, however updated and distorted. "Clash Of The Titans" could have been a nice popcorn return to civilization's colorfully chaotic roots; instead it dodders and pontificates, giving us a few peaks here and there at something greater behind its limp façade, but never coming close to delivering anything worthwhile.
"Clash" isn't interesting. It isn't even coherent. An angry Greek guy stands on a coastline, waves splashing extras as he chews the scenery and exposes his fillings while decrying his daughter's pregnant condition. To bury his shame, he sticks her and her son in a coffin and throws them into the ocean, which carries them to a magical isle where the boy, Perseus, grows into future "L.A. Law" star Harry Hamlin in his early beefcake days. Meanwhile, in an all-white space meant to be Olympus but more like a dentist's waiting room, a cross Zeus played by Lawrence Olivier decides to punish the father's murderous crime by, well, by destroying the father's city and murdering his subjects.
"Release the crappin'!" Zeus cries out.
Actually, that's kraken, a sea creature not part of Greek lore but an early chance for Harryhausen to strut his stuff.
Some movies live on because they are good. "Clash Of The Titans" seems to survive instead on nostalgia, for the Harryhausen aesthetic of Sinbad and Jason and claymation stop-action fight scenes with skeletons when such effects had to be earned with something more than a press of a button. It probably helps to have been young and impressionable when the film came out, geared as it is to a juvenile audience with a robotic owl clearly modeled on that classic Greek demigod R2-D2.
But the action scenes are not terribly gripping; even the Medusa scene praised by many here plays too choppy and inert. There's no interest in the characters; though Hamlin and co-star Judi Bowker are pretty to look at, they are given no more to do than recite threadbare lines with minimal emotion. The gods bicker and utter various profundities, with Olivier looking like he's being filmed between proctology exams and most of the other Olympians standing around looking concerned. Like Jamie Farr in "Scrooged" and Phil Silvers in "The Cheap Detective" Ursula Andress as Aphrodite has star billing and one line of dialogue. Maggie Smith pines for a mutant goat boy while Claire Bloom pines for the days she and Sir Larry worked on "Richard III."
Either director Desmond Davis and screenwriter Beverley Cross were inept, or else they were under strict orders from producer Harryhausen not to do anything interesting that would distract from his effects work. The sets are bare, the outfits plain (togas over jogging shorts), and the secondary characters exist largely to be killed off by Harryhausen's monsters or else cheer when the heroes do something we are supposed to be excited by. Burgess Meredith plays up his wizened-but-puckish persona as a playwright who helps Perseus capture the winged horse Pegasus, then both coot and steed melt into the background.
Greek myth stories have a lot of potential to entertain. They are the oldest surviving form of Western story, after all, and have been passed on a couple dozen centuries already at least, however updated and distorted. "Clash Of The Titans" could have been a nice popcorn return to civilization's colorfully chaotic roots; instead it dodders and pontificates, giving us a few peaks here and there at something greater behind its limp façade, but never coming close to delivering anything worthwhile.