Steven Spielberg: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Having filled my viewing gaps in Spielberg's filmography, the status of The Lost World: Jurassic Park as one of the director's weakest films, if not his worst film, has never been less in doubt. Other low points in the director's career have at least shown promise or intriguing premises: Hook may rely far too much on its regrettably hip version of the Lost Boys' hideout, but it sports two great performances and a high concept floated it through many of its glaring flaws. 1941 showed the director's first major, explicit attempt to revive the films of his youth for the modern multiplex, an approach that would soon bear fruit with the Indiana Jones franchise. Even the forgotten Always, with its too-broad combination of haunting movies A Matter of Life and Death and Only Angels Have Wings, had moments of beauty worthy of those wrenching melodramas.

In comparison, The Lost World seems such a cynical cash-in for Spielberg's biggest hit that hardly any visible reason exists as to why he would do it. It's not like the world's richest and most powerful director needed to do this to get approval for another film. His previous two films, the first Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, eradicated whatever sliver of doubt remained that Spielberg was King of Hollywood. The knowledge of the uselessness of the sequel makes its wretched, slapstick construction all the more grating.

Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

Pete Postlethwaite, 1946-2011

Like all mourning film fans, I awoke this morning to the terrible news of Pete Postlethwaite's passing.One of my favorite character actors, Postlethwaite will leave a hole that cannot be filled by any ordinary "that guy."


One of the great character actors, Postlethwaite carries a particular resonance in my life, as he was the first supporting player I ever noticed. When I was 7, I watched Dragonheart with a friend, not a film that set my wee mind ablaze even at such a young age, I nevertheless enjoyed but, more than the dragon or any of the action, I was mesmerized by this goofy side character, Brother Gilbert, a monk and aspiring poet who turned up at the oddest times and had the best lines. To this day, I remember giggling like the little brat I was when, during the climactic action scene, Gilbert secreted himself up a tree with a bow and arrow, inadvertently shot a man in the ass and said with hilariously focused glee, "Turn the other cheek, brother!" I was hooked. Who was this loon?

Since then, I've been delighted by him at nearly every turn, no matter how brief his appearances. He recently lit up an already strong cast in The Town with but two scenes that transcended the cops vs. robbers plot to show what real evil looks like. I didn't notice him at first in Inception, playing the dying but still disapproving billionaire father of Cillian Murphy's heir to the corporate throne, but when I did I got the same wash of elation I do whenever I recognized him in a movie.

It was part of the reason I never actively looked for his movies, never surfed IMDb to fill the gaps in the Postlethwaite canon, if you could call a series of roles that usually amounted to no more than a few lines of dialogue and one or two scenes each a "canon." I preferred to meet him as an old friend, randomly running into him on the street, thus preserving that constant delight I got from seeing him. Every time I got to see how he was doing, to briefly exchange pleasantries and move on to a day that suddenly seemed brighter.

Postlethwaite had "unconventional looks," though it's funny how the vast majority of people who have appeared in films since the medium's inception have not lined up with "conventional" beauty. He emerged looking fatherly, as if this man never existed as a youth but simply sprang up from the ground ready to look after children of his own. That paternal charm was double-edged: to take his two most prominent film roles, both of which were fathers, look at the difference between the man in In the Name of the Father and the tyrant of Distant Voices, Still Lives. In the former, he wants to help his son stay out of trouble, only to be used as leverage by outside for condemning the boy. In Terence Davies' anti-nostalgic poem, he captures the vicious, domineering, frightful side of patriarchy, a man who is violent and monstrous yet all the more terrifying before being raggedly, recognizably human. When he pauses while decorating the house for Christmas, a moment that occurs just before and after examples of his horrid abuse, his moment of gentle love, a touch that may have seemed a scripted, hollow moment in any other actor's hands becomes psychological and real.

That was his specialty: no part, no matter how small and even stilted, didn't leap off the page when he embodied it. Take his part as the hunter, Roland, in Steven Spielberg's misguided Jurassic Park sequel: The Lost World: he has killed beasts of all kinds and casually mounted some of the last of endangered species in a parlor, but when he sees the corporatization of animal herding, a cynical amalgamation of breeding and spectacle that outstrips even the most corrupt and abusive zoo, he blanches. It is a moment that makes no sense, the idea of a hunter suddenly leaving behind his ways when the only change in his usual ways is a matter of scale, but the look of utter disgust in his eyes, the dawning self-loathing that accompanies his friend's meaningless death and the capitalistic monetization of a primal impulse makes you feel the wrongness of what happens in that movie far more than Spielberg's overly suggestive camerawork and the speechifying of the good guys.

I'd follow Postlethwaite anywhere, always placing my trust in him but reserving enough wariness to expect his intensity. Sheila O'Malley already has a piece up on the actor that focuses on his devilish scene in The Town, where he sadistically and theatrically carves the thorns off roses while laying out why and how Ben Affleck's character will continue to work for him. It is a keenly acted piece, each thrust of the knife down the stem a punctuation to the mounting horror of his monologue. It's also a clever visualization of what Fergie is actually saying, his pruning of the rose matching up eerily to his descriptions of what he did to Doug's mother and what he'll do to his girlfriend if the disillusioned robber does not carry out his missions. The scene fits perfectly into Affleck's genre mash-up, a deliciously vile and exaggerated moment that taps into the character as totally as Jeremy Renner's own psychological development of his sociopath.

To say that I will miss Postlethwaite is an understatement. I would have loved to see his King Lear on the stage -- I cannot imagine an actor better suited for the role -- and to be left with a series of cameos seems unfitting for a talent that huge. But those performances still exist, some of which I've yet to discover, and I can still stumble upon his work with that same elation that I felt before when his sharp, foreboding but faintly kind face appeared on the screen. Steven Spielberg called him the best actor in the world, to which Pete responded in characteristically British fashion, "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, 'The thing about Pete is that he thinks he's the best actor in the world.'" But I have to side with Spielberg: even among the finest of character actors, few could do as much with as little as Pete Postlethwaite. May he rest in peace.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Before Lars von Trier attempted to tear down the musical with his inventive but ultimately repugnant Dancer in the Dark, British director Terence Davies managed to make a movie entirely dependent on the power and freedom of music while placing these ideas in the genre most antithetical to their expression: the kitchen-sink drama. Well, two movies, to be specific, as Distant Voices, Still Lives combines two short films made two years apart with separate crews. Von Trier at least let his protagonist indulge in a bit of fantastical revelry before smacking her down with cold reality. By contrast, the carefully arranged tableaux of family members Davies presents allow for no escape, and the flashbacks only ever seem to touch upon even unhappier times.

The first song filters over a static shot of the stairwell of a cozy but intimate home as the mother of the family (Freda Dowie) sings "I Get the Blues When It Rains." As her pure voice wafts over the soundtrack, the camera slowly swivels 180 degrees to focus on the house door, ending in a jump cut from the cloudy day to a sunny morning as a hearse arrives outside the home. Cut to a medium shot of a family arrayed in funereal blacks around a portrait of the deceased patriarch, so still and desaturated that the shot appears to be a photograph from an old family album until people begin to speak. Another cut shows the family in the same room but with wedding clothes, celebrating the betrothal of the oldest daughter, Eileen (Angela Walsh). That thin division between death and the promise of new life speaks to the hopelessness of this first part of Davies' diptych.

Before we can enjoy this happy moment, however, the children begin reminiscing about their childhood, taking us into frightening memories that unfold achronologically as memories always do. Eileen says aloud that she wishes her father could be there to see her wedding, but the other sister, Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), vituperatively states she doesn't, and we flash back to her begging her father (Pete Postlethwaite) to let her go to the dance as he makes her rigorously scrub the floors as if a modern-day Cinderella. At last, the father throws down some coins, then grabs a broom and beats the girl. Some memories spring from the flashbacks themselves, taking us deeper still into this domestic nightmare. One beautifully arranged sequence pans from the present, as Eileen sobs in her husband's arms for her dad, through darkness before traveling back to the past to see Tommy dutifully decorating the house for Christmas and whispering "God bless, kids" as he hangs stockings on the stairwell. Then, at the dinner on Christmas Day, Tommy suddenly leaps to his feet and drags the tablecloth and all the food onto the floor, screaming for his wife to come clean up the mess.


Another director might have used such juxtaposition to point out the victimhood of the women characters, but Davies captures the complexity of domestic abuse. Not even codependency can be used as a quick explanation for why strange feelings of connection linger, and the confused feelings in the survivors (and never has that term seemed more apt when considering the bereaved) bypass the usual dysfunctional family theatrics straight to a deeply identifiable authenticity.

That layered emotion extends to the use of music as well. Never is this more apparent than in the heartbreaking scene wherein the young children ask their mother, cheerfully cleaning windows, why she married their father. With a wistful, slightly wounded voice, she notes that he used to be such a good dancer. As she does this, Ella Fitzgerald's "Taking a Chance on Love" plays in the background. Suddenly, the scene cuts to Tommy viciously beating her and commanding her to stop crying as he does so while the music still plays over the image. Rather than use the song for ironic purposes, Davies digs into its various meanings and interpretations, initially tackling the more romantic and nostalgic side as the mother thinks back to a simpler time when she saw the rakish goodness in her man. Then, the director tackles the material from another angle, revealing that some chances lead to negative outcomes. And as the camera follows the aftermath of that beating, showing the wife's bruised face and arms as she silently resumes cleaning, we are spared even the slightest hint of black comedy from using music ironically. The closest antecedent to Davies' take on musical tunes is Chaplin's Limelight, a film actually quoted here when the son, Tony (Dean Williams), goes AWOL goes AWOL during his army training to confront his father. Thrown in the brig for his insubordination, Tony takes out a harmonica and plays the theme to Limelight, despite the anachronism. Chaplin's musical, as with the rest of his art, was at once grandiose and nuanced and, like Davies' film, autobiographical. Dissatisfied with casting his drunken performer as a dour version of the usual musical star, Chaplin too managed to add layers to his movie.

Both Distant Voices and Still Lives, the latter set about a decade later than the former, use the same locations -- the family house, a nearby pub, a hospital ward, the Catholic parish -- to elicit familiar moods. Outside the house, where the daughters and their friends go to smoke and talk, is a modicum of freedom, even if a yell from the father can send the girls scurrying back inside. At the pub is a sense of catharsis, where family and friends engage in drunken group singing that offers respite from the misery.

The difference in tone between the two films, however, is vast even as one is informed by the other. Distant Voices, true to its opening moments, is funereal, shot in faded sepia tones that take the family-photo aesthetic and sap any possible hint of golden nostalgia from it. By the time of Still Lives, the father does not hang over the film as much, allowing for a sense of happiness to intrude into the characters' lives. The shots often fade to white in this second half, suggesting a more spiritual presence, and a hopeful one.

By the same token, the sins of the father are passed onto the child, and Still Lives does not drop the ball of depressing domestic violence by showing how abuse begets abuse. The husbands of Eileen, Maisie and their friend Micky all separate the women, to the point that those pub nights become even more needed as it's the only time they get to see each other. The music of the '50s may be lighter, having progressed to the age of economic security following the cynicism of postwar blues, but society has not yet reached the rock revolution, and the gentler pop serves only to mask the tumultuous restart of the cycle.

I confess that, while I will never write off any genre or style wholesale (unless you start getting into esoterica), realism interests me the least of any major form of film structuring. Seeking only to be a reflection of reality strikes me as a waste of the artform, as I can simply turn off the movie and walk outside if I want true reality. But Davies, like the best realists, finds a way to make something genuine while still taking liberties. His tableaux may be bleak and informed by his real life, but by filtering them through memory he can bound about time as he pleases and create elliptical suggestion instead of blunt narrative. We are never all that sure when any scene is, so those repeated locations come to take on the anchoring role time normally plays.

Additionally, some aspects of Davies' direction seem to break from reality entirely. Voices filter through the ether and family members appear in shadow as if ghosts (or demons) flowing in the background of memory. The split-screen of Tony and Eileen's husband falling in slow-motion through the same skylight, Davies' way of communicating that the two suffer industrial accidents around the same time, is pure fantasy. But even something that shows a clear remembrance of detail, such as the shot of Tommy's body lying in a viewing area with pennies over his eyes, has a surreal quality to it. It transcends Catholic tradition, suggesting the father may be headed to Hades, not a Christian afterlife. The direction is so subtle that the real becomes fantastical and the subjective breaks attain an effortless verisimilitude.

The subjectivity of Davies' structure makes the film feel truer to life. No one in this movie stands for anything. Even the father is no simple metaphor or symbol to be worked out the way one obsesses over the hyperrealistic portrait of a widowed homemaker in Jeanne Dielman. As the old cliché goes, this is a film with people, not characters. Even the shadow of World War II that hangs over the flashbacks of Distant Voices is about the way the children handle it instead of the results of the constant Luftwaffe attacks, and our understanding of them deepens with these events. Because we pick up on these characters and the way they see the world, we can see the cycles getting ready to repeat as the young women beg their father to go out dancing, the same way the mother met Tommy. When Tony cries the night of his wedding, one can intuit that he fears becoming his father, knowing that this moment of bliss will not last, and that even the most minor squabble could bring out his dark side.

The film has a thoroughly British sensibility, from idiomatic conversation to obsolete pub drinks ordered each time the cast enters the local tavern. But Davies transcends any confinement: by rejecting Catholicism, he allows his film to find the spirituality of true humanism, in which people are viewed on their own terms and not as players on but one plane of existence. Too, even the Britishness, a means of expunging the cultural ties that also weigh down Davies' darker memories, does not limit the film's power to those who grew up in the ever-gray skies of London. True, a film like this set in America could not afford to be so bleak, even if Davies already contends that he softened what really happened in his life to make it remotely bearable on-screen. But who cannot identify with the family home, the local hideaway or the church that contains as many bad memories as good? All of this joins with the music, bleakly but never cynically used, to trigger and release as many of the audience's hangups as the director's. As the film's tagline says, "In memory, everything happens to music," and Davies understands that is because only music can fully capture the contradicting feelings of life. From misery comes hope, and while hope's only effect may be nothing more than to raise one's tolerance for pain so the universe doubles its efforts to break the psyche, it can still keep us going.

Little seen and outrageously left off DVD in the States (the UK didn't even get it until 2007), Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of the most profoundly moving and daringly conceived projects of the 1980s, and one of the most human and deeply felt movies I have ever seen. Normally, I must turn to Asian cinema to be so thoroughly moved. Davies has not been a prolific filmmaker since, though his 2008 documentary, Of Time and the City, won rave reviews at Cannes. Let us hope that revitalizes him somewhat. On the basis of this film alone, I would consider him to be a master of his art.

The Town

After turning his career 180 degrees with his expertly economic take on Dennis Lehane with Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck appears to be on a mission to claim the city of Boston as his cinematic turf. Just how Bostonian is his heist movie The Town? Its climax takes place at Fenway Park. Oh my Gahd.

Compared to its haunting predecessor, The Town aims lower. Rather than dig into the psychology of a missing child and the moral quandary presented by her neglectful, addicted mother, The Town contents itself to be a taut, B-movie thriller. And yet it is also denser than Gone Baby Gone, trying not only to work as a heist movie but a coming-of-age tale and a romance. Essentially, it mashes up clichés from three different kinds of movies into something that has no right to work but does, thanks to Affleck's economic direction and his sure-handed ability to get fine performances from his actors.

After using his previous film to promote his brother Casey's considerable talent, Affleck uses his latest to build off the acting comeback of Hollywoodland by playing Doug MacCray, a failed hockey player who returned in disgrace to the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, where, opening title cards tell us, the highest concentration of bank robbers in the world are born. With a father serving several life sentences for robbery and murder, Doug continues on the "family business," leading a crew of thuggish, arrogant townies whose appearances belie their intelligence and capabilities. When they rush into a bank at the start of the film, they establish a professional precision in no time. They know when the silent alarm goes out, when the safe's time lock opens, where the tracers and dye packs are placed in money, how to make sure no one does anything stupid (including collecting cell phones), and they bring bleach to get rid of any evidence they might leave behind. In a five-minute stretch that includes no prior discussions of planning or obligatory shots of blueprints -- though those do come later -- Affleck conveys just how experienced these four guys are with their work.

The heist goes off without a hitch even though someone trips the silent alarm, but the gang takes the manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage just in case. Having watched her co-worker beaten by one of the robbers, Claire is rattled, and even when she is released without harm she can barely stop shaking for days. When the gang discovers that the woman lives four blocks away from them, Doug tracks her down and winds up falling in love. It's just stupid and crazy enough to be brilliant, and as much as women in film are constantly set up to help a man grow up, Affleck avoids the trap of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

For one thing, Claire is too shaken up to actively bring Doug out of his own stew of self-pity, and we're basically watch a couple repair their relationship after a big shock rather than have them meet and be totally happy until the Big Misunderstanding. Doug helps Claire through the post-traumatic stress disorder that he helped give her, while she inspires him to really try to leave the game he never seems to enjoy, not nearly to the same extent as his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner, unabashedly channeling Jimmy Cagney).

Jem pressures Doug about the relationship, and his fears are not unwarranted. Bearing down upon the gang is an FBI agent, Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), a man who's been on the force so long that he has no qualms with overstepping certain ethical boundaries to intimidate cooperation from the tight-knit Charlestown community. I know I just waded waist-deep into clichés, but there's no way to talk about The Town without bogging down in various things you've all heard before.

So let us instead talk about why it remains an enjoyable film. Renner builds off his Hurt Locker buzz brilliantly, even if he continues to play an arrogant, self-absorbed, dangerous man whose rash behavior threatens the cohesion and effectiveness of a group of thieves as much as it does a special Army unit. Jem sees Doug as a brother, and when the weary gang leader speaks of leaving this destructive lifestyle behind, Jim does not disguise his unwillingness to release his friend. Hamm, so memorable on Mad Men, offers a number of fine reasons for continued work on the big screen, from his chiseled look to his ability to maintain some semblance of decorum even as the fury begins to seep out of Frawley's eyes. Paired up in a surprisingly funny double act with Lost's Titus Welliver, Hamm fuses the broad comic talent he shows on his appearances on 30 Rock with the more severe side of his dramatic acting. He's often funny, but not in a way that necessarily makes you laugh.

Even the minor characters are perfectly case. Blake Lively plays Jem's sister and Doug's ex-girlfriend, and her Oxycontin-addled behavior adds a layer of tragedy to the film. Doug wants no part of her anymore, leaving her to raise her 19-month-old baby alone. From the moment you see her, you know she'll be the ones the cops coerce, and when they finally come knocking, all she can say is, "Why is it that I'm the one who's always getting used?" Chris Cooper has one scene as Doug's father but he makes it count; locked away in prison, this gray-haired, bespectacled man still talks of settling disputes with younger inmates and asserting control over the other gangs. Beneath his hardened exterior, however, is a sad, old man who will sit in a cage until he dies, all because of absurd notions of honor among thieves. Pete Postlethwaite, one of my favorite "that guys," also makes an appearance as "The Florist," the man at the top of the robberies who exerts brutal dominion over the various crews and knows just how to hurt them in order to keep them in the game as long as they're useful.

As for Affleck, he never oversells the point as he often did in the past. He has a few meaty chunks of dialogue that force him to put on his "acting face," but he hasn't seemed so natural since his heyday with films like Chasing Amy and Good Will Hunting. Compare the way that he lets his facial language do the talking to the trailer of his next starring feature, The Company Men, which played before The Town. Granted, it's unfair to judge by a trailer, but that film offers glimpses of Affleck at his most ingratiating and "Robin Williams-esque," trying too hard to sell an obvious point. When he starts slipping into Serious Mode here, his style is in-keeping with the B-movie vibe, and he never gets ahead of himself.

His direction, however, is even better. His editing in the opening heist is fast but measured, a healthy blend of the frenetic, modern pacing and a more classical style. The Town boasts one of the better car chases in recent memory, bumping up against the Paul Greengrass style of incomprehensible shots of shrieking, crunching metal without jumping fully into shakycam waters. Some of Affleck's inter-cutting can seem awkward, but when he matches shots of Doug and Claire having sex with Claire being released by Doug and the gang at the beginning, the obtuseness of comparing her orgasm to the euphoria of finding out that she would not be harmed after all becomes somewhat beautiful.

A Michael Mann film this is not, despite the clear influence that director exerts over the picture, yet Affleck still has an eye for detail. One of the most suspenseful moments of the film involves Jem stumbling across Doug and Claire and trying to mask his surprise. Meanwhile, Doug, who knows that Claire might recognize the tattoo on the back on Jem's neck and alert the cops, attempts to keep the tattoo out of sight. Similarly, the blood on Claire's shirt, splattered on her when Jem beat her co-worker, triggers memories in the audience as well as her, and it's a shame that Affleck felt he needed to then insert some shots of the robbery to remind us.

Unfortunately, Affleck wants The Town to be too many B-movies, so it occasionally meanders when it leaves behind the romance and the thrills for a more preposterous coming-of-age/midlife crisis story. When the elements click, however, it's a damn fine film. Most of the dialogue is to-the-point and carries the kind of wit that normally comes from someone older and more familiar with the subject matter: as Welliver and Hamm brief other officers about the gang, they note the limitations placed on them by due process but also of the ways that those laws have been bent. "We'll never get 24-hour surveillance unless one of these idiots converts to Islam," says Dino.

That unforced humor, mixed with the thrilling heist and chase scenes and the fitfully endearing romance, makes The Town uneven but rewarding, a film that embodies countless tropes and modes but manages to funnel them into something enjoyable. It's also a B-movie that doesn't rely on irony, which is a nice change of pace from even the more entertaining movies like Machete. It's earnest and eager, maybe too eager, and if it's a step-down from the triumph of Gone Baby Gone, it's also proof that the previous film wasn't a fluke and that Ben Affleck could well find a way to fuse his mainstream appeal with his desire to make genuine art.

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.