Clash of the Titans (2010)

Liam Neeson said that he took the role of Zeus in Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans because his sons love Greek mythology. When they saw the film, or even its predecessor, I wonder if one of them whispered to their father in the first minute, "Dad, the Kraken isn't Greek." No, not only is the Kraken not of Greek origin, it's not even a creature of ancient mythology, a combination of similar, fabled sea monsters of Norse sagas c. 12th century A.D. updated and given its first concrete classification all the way in 1735 by Carolus Linnaeus before being cemented into modern myth 20 years later by Erik Pontoppidan, the bishop of Bergen. According to Clash of the Titans, the Kraken was created by Hades to overthrow the titans, and along with it the thrilling complexities of Greek legend.

Why does Hollywood insist on altering Greek mythology for the purposes of making it "cooler"? After all, considering its appropriation by the Romans, the Greek lore was the mythology so nice, they used it twice. The Disneyfication of lore makes sense for the animated Hercules, precisely because it's too damn wild for children: in the actual mythology, the blackness of Chaos bore the first Titans, most importantly Gaia (Earth), who asexually conceived and gave birth to a son, Ouranos, who took his mother for his wife. Eventually, Gaia grew so outraged with her son-husband's domineering madness that she had one of her sons, Cronus, castrate him. Cronus married his sister and took his father’s place, eating all of his offspring out of fear save Zeus, hidden away by his mother. Eventually, Zeus revealed himself and poisoned his father into vomiting up the other gods, who overthrew their parents and imprisoned the Titans in Tartarus. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: the lore is thick with deceit, incest, wrath, jealousy and murder. In other words, it is almost exactly like French history.

I suppose it’s inevitable that Clash of the Titans should be so careless with its source material (its fundamental source material, that is), given the fact that at no point during the film does a Titan rear its gigantic head, much less clash with something or someone. When the first round of promotional material for the film slipped onto the Internet, the attached tagline, "Titans Will Clash" was met with well-earned derision, and when it slipped from the next batch of posters and trailers, one might reasonably have assumed that the studio backpedaled from the reception of the previous ads. Maybe they were just afraid of being sued for false advertisement.

To harp on that subject further, though, would be pointless, as the original Clash also lacked Titans. That appears to have slipped the minds of some of the more outraged critics sharpening their xiphos in preparation for battle; perhaps many do not remember the absence of titular clashers in the original because the original is itself so unmemorable, given a niche in film history solely for the effects of Ray Harryhausen. Tellingly, Harryhausen's remarkable stop-motion creatures are the only significant aspect of the first not to make its way into Leterrier's update, which ports over the cheesy dialogue, ludicrous narrative and wooden acting, as if to say that the negatives of cinema are timeless; its the innovation that fades.

So, yes, we still follow Perseus (Sam Worthington), mortal son of Zeus, cast into the sea with his murdered mother by the king she cuckolded. Rescued by a fisherman, Spyros (Pete Postlethwaite), who immediately launches into outraged platitudes toward the cruel gods, Perseus grows up to be a simple fisher, but even his adoptive father knows that the boy is destined for great things. Then the family finds themselves beside a cliff where soldiers from Argos topple a statue of Zeus in defiance of the gods. Hades rises from the depths, kills the soldiers and turns his sights on the innocent family's boat, killing Perseus' father, mother and sister. All of this occurs in the film just a bit faster than it took you to read this paragraph.

The rest of the film bounds along at this breathless pace, introducing a sliver of exposition in time to launch into another action segment, which itself is too brief and frenetic to properly engage the audience -- that damn Kraken appears in full-form for less than a minute -- before settling down into the next half-hearted setup. Perseus teams up with the god-hating Argives to defy Olympus and protect the city from destruction in retribution for their heresy, moving from a forest where he must fight his biological mother's mutilated husband, head out to the desert to meet Djinn (that's from Arabic mythology, right?) and fight off giant scorpions (um), go to the underworld, yadda yadda yadda.

Titans moves through these sequences as if ticking off items on a checklist, pausing only to let loose the sort of hysterically overbearing dialogue that practically defines these swords-and-sandals romps. Spyros kicks off the proceedings with his impromptu rant at the gods brought on by a fishing dry spell: "One day, somebody's going to have to say 'enough,'" he cries, apparently so green at his life's profession that he doesn't understand that the fish just don't bite sometimes. Had this been set in contemporary times, Spyros might easily have been one of those hyperbolic golfers who attributes every slice and near-miss to the cruel intervention of forces who apparently have nothing better to do than fuck with a peon. Everyone speaks in a tone of voice that suggests he or she is rallying the troops; didn't anyone in the mythological world ever just mosey on over to the town well for a light conversation, a nice chat about the Hydra someone's kid killed or the results of last night's Olympic match? Sam Worthington, who uttered last year's heavyweight champion Worst Line -- "Now I know what death tastes like" -- in Terminator Salvation manages to avoid the worst of the clangers, but he has to spend the entire film shunning the god in him, insisting on carrying out his tasks "as a man" until someone slaps some sense into him.

All of the actors look bored, as if they'd understood the cheesiness of the script and thought it would translate into a more raucous piece of entertainment. But as they traveled to various locations filled with the same sharp, rocky landscapes, so nondescript that one almost wishes they'd simply used CGI sets to cut down on the carbon emissions of all those plane rides, the gears started turning and each of the cast slowly came to the grim realization of how dull this picture really is. Worthington, still locked into his increasingly thin portrayal of a reluctant but determined hero, is as stony as all those statues that litter this ancient world, and if he did succumb to the Medusa when he enters her lair, I don't know that anyone would have been able to tell. Alexa Davalos plays Andromeda, the beautiful princess of Argos, whose sacrifice the gods demand for the forgiveness of the city, and her immediate willingness to die for her people somewhat takes the wind out the sails for the dramatic buildup of the rest of the film. Liam Neeson looks pleased enough to be there, but perhaps only because he shares most of his scenes with Ralph Fiennes, giving him a constant visual reminder that someone had it worse than him. Fiennes hisses more as Hades, lord of the underworld, than he does as the serpentine Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films. Dressed, amazingly, uproariously, in a fashion that resembles John Travolta's get-up in Battlefield Earth, Fiennes does not inspire terror so much as giggles.* He understandably looks eager to get off the set, though in that outfit maybe it's so he can audition to be in a black metal band that writes songs inspired by Lord of the Rings.

There are a few nice touches, to be fair. If Leterrier insists on casting aside Harryhausen's marvelous animation in favor of big CGI that doesn't look any better and is too haphazardly edited to be identified anyway, he at least did us the service of omitting Bubo, the R2-D2-esque robot owl from the original; Bubo even makes an appearance in an Argos armory, only to be thrown out of the picture when a soldier pressures Perseus to "just leave it." Andromeda spends the film either on her way to be dangled as bait for the gods' appeasement or finally on the rack, but the audience likely won't care either way about her thanks to the far more arresting character of Io. An ageless mortal who watches over Perseus, Io has a wit and a spark that no one else in the film approaches, and Gemma Arterton acts well beyond her 24 years, to the point that even her gorgeous looks have an air of maturity to them. And despite the general laziness of the action scenes, the Medusa sequence is genuinely entertaining. Like the rest of the scenes, it's too short, but at no other point in the film does Leterrier create and maintain a sense of tension and atmosphere.

It's a shame that filmmakers constantly flub Greek mythology, as it's the most interesting of all the major religions, old or new. Modern theologies posit all-powerful deities to be feared and worshipped incessantly, at once benevolent and wrathful. The Greeks, however, made their gods more human, not simply though the act of anthropomorphizing them through art but in simple conception. For them, gods were arrogant and inbred, capable of walking among their creations but never truly seeing them. The gods fear their children: they overthrew their parents, so naturally they fear a similar fate (remember that Zeus attempted to murder his own wife and child until Athena burst full-grown from his head). Clash of the Titans flirts with this astonishing notion, of the way that generations build off the last and better themselves instead of fade as increasingly faulty copies of a perfect original like CDs and swapped music files from a crisp master tape, but it does not follow through. It pays lip service to how "badass" it would be to fight monsters, ignoring that which is truly awe-inspiring: the fact that, if sufficiently motivated, a human can challenge the gods themselves.



*It would be nice, though, if someone would stop making Hades out to always be a villain just to make things easier for a crowd primarily raised on a new mythology by equating Hades to Satan. Hades is far more passive a figure in the legends, dispassionately maintaining balance instead of actively usurping and murdering. Death holds no grudges.

Avatar

I love James Cameron.

Let me back up. The Terminator was the first R-rated film I was allowed to watch as a child, at the ripe age of six (my parents brought down the hammer if nudity was involved, but for some reason all the violence in the world was fine, which more or less makes me a microcosm of warped American priorities in censorship). To this day, I prefer it over its smash hit sequel, not simply for nostalgic reasons but because the original is one of the most visceral and fast-paced (while still intelligent) action-thrillers ever made. As I grew, I came to admire his perfect visuals and and his Fulleresque dialogue, long before I knew who Fuller was so I could assign an "esque" to him.

Avatar, his return to science fiction following Terminator 2 and his first narrative feature since 1997's Titanic, will inevitably be lost in the hype, regardless of whether it makes back its considerable budget or flounders. It's almost impressive, given the sheer, mind-blowing, tongue-tying scope of the film. Cameron, along with the technical crew he amassed in his decade-long wait for technology to catch up to his vision, create a world that is animated but real, featuring motion-captured actors without ever looking like Robert Zemeckis' dead-eyed, creepy kid's films. The result is something, for all the inflated pre-release hysteria, truly revolutionary, even if it won't change the face of cinema as we know it.

Narratively, Avatar doesn't stray far from Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and one can easily draw lines to numerous science fiction, action, adventure and epic movies. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, the next Jude Law in terms of ubiquity), a paraplegic ex-Marine, travels to Pandora, the moon of a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri to take his dead twin's place in a scientific experiment. The moon is inhabited by a species called the Na'vi, a race of 9ft tall, blue-skinned humanoids who just so happen to live on top of a reserve of unobtanium (the biggest shout-out the fictitious material has yet received). Humans cannot breathe the atmosphere, and the prospect of open war threatens PR liabilities for the company hiring all these contractors, so a group of scientists creates Na'vi -human hybrids known as Avatars. Controlled via a mental link, the Avatars allow the humans to venture into Pandora' endless forest, able to experience all of their senses while in bodies that can run for hours and withstand massive injuries. These humans believe that looking theNa'vi will gain the natives' trust, allowing for the introduction of education and modernization, along with a peaceful solution to a heartless corporation's money-grab.

As one might expect, Cameron does not exactly tackle this story, a conflict between pure, nature-loving natives and a corporation that treats an entire planet as so much dirt and sticks standing in the way of a fat quarterly report, with what we might call "subtlety." Jake works for the scientists, but his true allegiance lies with Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the leader of the mercenary forces who acts like Robert Duvall's Col. Kilgore on steroids. He infiltrates the Na'vi on the colonel's behalf, exploiting the tribe's acceptance of him when the seeds from their gigantic "Hometree " signal that he is special; naturally, the longer he stays with them, the more he comes to love their way of life. Eventually, he sides with the Na'vi over the humans.

Cameron's primary strength as a storyteller has always been his ability to cover up his vast weaknesses as a storyteller: The Terminator is, in terms of screenplays only, still his finest film, because it hits the ground running and features only two moments of pure exposition, one laced with an undercurrent of tension and the other culminating in a sex scene with some breasts. Know your audience, budding filmmakers. But with Terminator 2 and his mega-hit Titanic, he occasionally broke all narrative momentum for moments of expository dialogue and dubious displays of emotion. Aliens, in contrast to Ridley Scott's original, is absurdly direct, but so skillfully directed that one never questions the two-dimensionality of his characters or his blunt dialogue (that he would with this film seek to cover this up with actual 3-D visuals perhaps offers some insight into his mindset). This is a film where non-scientific humans are bloodthirsty killers and natives are literally in tune with nature, thanks to some funky tendrils in their hair. All roads in the story lead to Massive Firefight. Even the character names are basic and obvious: Jacob, the liar who disguised himself as his brother to steal his inheritance, infiltrates the tribe to betray them but later feels regret and shame. Cameron not only uses this story to comment upon the extermination of Native Americans that haunts America' past but on the problems plaguing our present: at one point, someone actually says the line, "We will fight terror with terror."

And yet, Avatar is more than the sum of its clichéd script. The many comparisons people have made to Dances with Wolves are certainly true, but, when you factor in the visuals, Avatar edges closer to the great cinematic tone poems of natural beauty, Baraka and the Qatsi series. The rendered world of Pandora is a living, breathing specimen, its web of tree roots serving as synapses to accept stimuli and issue responses. The Na'vi can plug themselves into this world and, by the end, so can we. This can be partially attributed to Cameron's innovative 3-D technology, used not for distracting moments where objects arbitrarily fly toward the screen and, thus, the audience but to add stereoscopic vision to the mise-en-scène (though I confess I'm still not sold on 3-D technology and would have found the film perfectly lush and overpowering without it). More than simple technological breakthroughs, though, Avatar is so captivating because Cameron threw everything into the world and its fully animated inhabitants. The plants react to the characters' touch, glowing, shrinking, expanding at under the weight of footsteps or the light caress of a finger; the animals have obvious real-life counterparts but are perfectly crafted to look like a part of Pandora itself. Cameron helps us achieve a oneness with Pandora, its unspoiled beauty contrasting harshly with the angular machines the humans bring to subjugate it. We never see Cameron's idea of a futuristic Earth, but Jake mentions once that it no longer has trees, and the harsh juxtaposition of the modern, "civilized" world and the untainted purity of "primitives" in Koyaanisqatsi.

The Na'vi, even above Pandora, are a technical marvel. Taking the innovations behind Gollum and expanding them, the Avatar crew create the most photorealistic CGI creatures yet: every moment is fluid, the gracile bodies of the towering creatures bending and twisting with pure beauty. The Na'vi also sport faces matching the actors playing them: Worthington's Avatar gradually shifts from looking bemused and stupid to a collected warrior who projects an aura that signals he's a leader of men (or Na'vi). Weaver, so authoritative and intimidating in her height and intellect among the humans but filled with awe and a dopey, nerdy glee while walking through the jungle in her Avatar.Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the warrior princess who teaches Jake and falls in love with him, is oddly, inescapably sexy. While Cameron has never completely fleshed out a character in his life and doesn't start here, the Na'vi and the humans in Avatars have personalities where the Injuns of Dances with Wolves are uniformly portrayed as noble creatures in a pathetic grab for political correctness; I was overjoyed to see a Na'vi that was just a complete dick for most of the film. I saw Avatar with a group of friends, one of whom left the theater waxing about how he too wanted to be a Na'vi after watching the film. Who on Earth wouldn't?

How then, does one rate Avatar? It's impossible to ignore its narrative deficiencies, what with its tendency to stop all plot movement for moments of blatant moralizing and its half-hearted attempt to link this pure fairy tale to political relevance (how sad it is, though, that Cameron's dialogue that concerns the War on Terror has likely been in some version of the script for years and still applies). Yet some of the breaks in the story allow us more time to marvel at Pandora's lush offerings. Even if his script is his least-engaging, least-suspenseful yet, his visuals have a maturity to them that stunned me. When Cameron retreated from fictive films to wait for the development of the necessary technology for this film, the King of the World lost his action throne to Michael Bay, an inbred Hapsburg whose malformed brain concocts ludicrous decisions that fly from jaws that cannot properly close. Compare Bay's style of hectic, sloppy filmmaking to Cameron's willingness to literally stop and smell the roses, or the poetry of a bombing run so horrific that its haunting reverie is in no way undone by James Horner's derivative score. There is true beauty in Avatar, the sort I'd never expect a director like Cameron to depict.

What James Cameron may have created, in his dogged,uncompromising, notoriously difficult way, is this generation's equivalent of Star Wars. Like Lucas' landmark cash-cow, Avatar sports a deeply clichéd, often flat-out boring story, but one filtered through the prism of such visual innovation and imagination that everything else becomes secondary. My generation never had such a film; I leeched off of Star Wars like every other kid who grew up in the '90s -- the closest thing we had to a technical breakthrough that allowed for sumptuous fantasy filmmaking was, well, Terminator 2, which could hardly introduce children to their own imagination like Star Wars or this can. As I am now old enough to see the glaring flaws of Lucas' film, and of this, I wouldn't dare proclaim Avatar a masterpiece, but it has filled every thought I've had since leaving the theater. Cameron announced that, given the time, money and resources he sank into this project he was considering writing two sequels. Where this story can go I'm not sure, but if it sets up the possibility for an Empire Strikes Back-like maturation of tone and delivery, the best is yet to come.

Terminator Salvation

Funny as it may seem, technology has rendered the Terminator franchise irrelevant. Even as we increasingly automate our industries, the sheer existence of the Internet throws a monkey wrench into the bedrock of the story: if Skynet is now a virus instead of some bank of supercomputers, then its power is limited only to the number of computers it can corrupt. But as we saw in the abysmal Terminator 3, Skynet still stooped to nuclear war, which is ridiculous for two very important reasons: 1) nuclear annihilation isn't big on the fear list in a post-Cold War world and 2) Skynet is only hurting itself. In the original films, it had a reason to nuke mankind: as a centralized computer, it had a solid position to defend. But a software program spread via the Internet is only hurting itself with nuclear bombs, as they destroy computers not only with the blast itself but the electromagnetic pulse that emits with a detonation.

This has been irking me since the last installment of the franchise, but I must admit: watching Terminator Salvation, it was the last thing on my mind. What did occupy space in my cranium were thoughts like "Did they really just say that?" "Has this guy ever even worked with a home video camera?" "Christian Bale, who is selective when it comes to scripts, picked this?" I had some other thoughts as well, but none I would share in civilized company.

Terminator Salvation doesn't ask much of the audience, at least not when it comes to the plot: in 2003, a death-row inmate dies. Cut to the present-future, and he's alive again. Despite not knowing where or when he is and what all the robots running around killing people are, he fights. No one questions this. Swap out some names, rinse, later and repeat, and you've got the movie.

But McG is asking a lot of us when he subjects us to the most blatantly obvious commercial for action figures since Transformers, which doesn't even count since that's based on toys to begin with. He has a high standard to live up to in the shadow of James Cameron, but whatever pressure he might have felt, that doesn't excuse his choices.

Salvation seeks to explore the war we caught glimpses of in the other films, but fails to establish a mood. I was surprised to discover that the film did indeed have a cinematographer, as the film at no point has a clear sense of placement, lighting or shadow. Characters appear in dead-center as opposed to obeying the rule of thirds, which might seem rebellious if it didn't look so clueless.

The inmate in question is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), who emerges from a slumber or a coma or -- oh, who am I kidding? They tell us he's a Terminator in the trailer. Well, at least he doesn't realize he's a Terminator, and he stumbles across the wasteland of old Los Angeles until he stumbles across -- whaddya know -- young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). Marcus, of course, doesn't know what a Terminator is, but he can fix a broken radio almost instantly and rewire a car that hasn't run in years. Reese is happy just to be leaving the death trap, and he tags along without a moment's pause.

Meanwhile, John Connor is a high-level officer in the Resistance -- not, as the first three films would have us believe, the leader. He's played by Christian Bale, who growls the growl of the growly growler, a growler who's stared death in the face. And growled. When things get really tense, he yells. Late in the film, he gives a speech about the need to retain humanity in the war, lest they become like the machines, in his growly anti-human voice.

McG contrasts the stories of Connor and the father he's yet to meet, bridging them via Marcus. Marcus ends up with Connor after some giant gatherers take Kyle prisoner. The machine in question is a marvel of idiocy: it's over 60 feet tall, Lord knows how many tons, but it manages to sneak up on Kyle, Marcus and a group of survivors in a broken down building. I'll repeat that: a 60-ft tall robot that moves on land snuck up on someone. Also, despite its size, it can only pick up two people at a time. After collecting a number of prisoners, it dumps them in a facility that apparently produces sparks. These are only the tip of the iceberg of the many absurdities Skynet perpetuates: if they hate humans so much, why are all of their ground units anthropomorphic? And when Skynet unveils its new T-800 line at the end, its face looks suspiciously like Arnold's. Now, this is not a new flaw, but why does Skynet use one human model to create units to infiltrate human cells?

The human side doesn't make much more sense. The first two installments of the franchise depicted a future in which mankind is on the brink of annihilation and they're lucky if they can cobble together a gun to shoot. Population is down here as well, but somehow the Resistance have an air force. Where the hell do they get the fuel for the planes? Did Skynet seriously not torch the oil fields in between the nuclear strikes? Have they become the Rain Man of dystopic, rebellious robots?

Maybe I wouldn't ask so many questions if the action scenes were any good, but McG's haphazard direction ruins that. He's got some halfway decent visuals, but he just throws things on-screen that he thinks are cool with no regard to impact. And it doesn't help that the sound drops with nearly every explosion and every gunshot. Seriously, I rarely take the time to note this, but I stayed through the credits to spot the name of Nigel Albermaniche, the sound editor. I'm always willing to give filmmakers endless chances to prove themselves -- I keep seeing Michael Bay films, don't I? -- but it is my sincere hope that this man never works in entertainment again. I have never heard such terrible sound mixing, and I've seen The Room. I almost feel sorry for the guy, as earlier in the day I saw Drag Me to Hell, which boasts the best sound I've heard in years. I've never been great at discerning good mixing, but that film was stellar. It only makes this half-assed fizzle all the more pathetic.

However, I would have forgiven Albermaniche had he done us all the favor of dropping the sound when the characters spoke. I knew I was in for a long ride in the opening prison scene, where a scientist stricken with terminal cancer (Helena Bonham Carter, delivering just enough lines to collect a nice paycheck) convinces Marcus to sign over his body: he agrees provided he can kiss her. When he pulls back, he whispers "So that's what death tastes like." Oh God. Later, the writers display a total lack of regard for continuity: someone says that Connor is "the prophesized leader of the Resistance." First of all, John Connor is not the 'prophesized' leader of anything, because that isn't a word. Second, how can he be the prophesied leader? No one other than John knew this was coming. And he's been a part of the Resistance from the start, so he didn't just come out of nowhere. It's like they simply thought that the not-word 'prophesized' added gravitas. And they're delivered by actors who clearly don't care: Bale is so one note that he nearly undoes a career of unpredictability. Common, the worst of them all, is almost certainly reading his lines from a cue behind the camera.

In retrospect, I should have seen this coming: a celebrated franchise from one of the all-time great science fiction writer-directors in the hands of an established hack who insists on calling himself "McG." But in a time when America can elect a black president, I allowed myself to hope. Now my heart is cold again. I'm giving this half a star, and that's entirely for Anton Yelchin. He's the only one who delivers his lines convincingly, and he actually seems like a kid who grew up in a post-apocalyptic world. The rest is a wash. What is the point of this film? It ends in the same place it started: with John Connor fighting robots. It won't revive interest in the franchise, because people still love the old films. At best, it makes Terminator 3 look like a passable film, which it isn't. That's how bad this is. If this is where humans are taking art with the advent of new technology, then no wonder the machines want to rise up and kill us.