CLASH OF THE TITANS

Back on Jan 11 (which seems about a decade ago), I posted still photos from the then-forthcoming movie Clash of the Titans and suggested how those images could represent different kinds of extreme metal bands. You can see that here. The movie is now out, and seems to be drawing hoards of viewers. I haven’t seen it yet, though I intend to — despite a review I read by the always wicked Anthony Lane in the April 12 issue of that famous metal zine, The New Yorker. It’s just too funny not to share a few excerpts:

There is an awful lot of clashing in “Clash of the Titans,” but no Titans. A pity, for the real Titans were early-model deities, born of Uranus and Gaea; she, peeved by her husband, took the unusual step of forging what one ancient text describes as “a saw-toothed scimitar,” with which her son Cronos then “harvested his father’s genitals.” All of which would have made the perfect Lars von Trier film.

Instead, we have to be content with late-period gods and monsters, plus efficient head removal and the odd winged horse, but not a single act of castration. How do these people hope to earn our respect?

(more after the jump . . .)

More from Anthony Lane’s review:

Louis Leterrier’s film stars Sam Worthington, but you will have guessed that already. These days, no major production is allowed to embark without him. He is the strapping Australian lad who, without warning, has found himself cast as a cyborg, in “Terminator Salvation,” as a would-be alien, in “Avatar,” and now as the demigod Perseus, in “Clash of the Titans,” while retaining the look of someone who cheerfully expects to be returning to a steady job on a building site. Sometime, if his luck holds, he could actually play a purebred human being and stay that way till the end of the movie; for now, though, he must be content with fifty per cent.

As a man, Perseus can march up hills and down into the mouth of hell with warrior friends like Draco (Mads Mikkelsen), who teaches him swordsmanship—“Stay focussed,” he says, in a phrase that scholars have long sought, yet never found, in the pages of the Iliad. Where is the fun, by contrast, in the lives of those who dwell on Mt. Olympus? They stand around on individual floating platforms like bored, middle-aged sunseekers waiting to do pool aerobics.

Danny Huston, in the role of Poseidon, gets about a line and a half of dialogue and then drops out of the movie, while [Liam] Neeson, as team leader [Zeus], comes wrapped in so much aluminum foil that, if I were an attendant mortal, I wouldn’t quite know whether to worship him or take him out every hour and baste him.

There’s more in this vein, and you can go here to read all of it.

But I’m gonna see the movie anyway. As a rule, I never let middling reviews stop me from seeing movies with giant scorpions, winged horses, krakens, people being turned to stone, and characters and creatures that remind me of metal bands.

Have you seen the movie?  What did you think?