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Clash Of The Titans is the second movie in short time dealing with Greek mythology, the other being Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief and both having demigod Perseus as the main character. The tone is entirely different though, yet a lot of the same characters pop up in both movies. In both movies Hades and Medusa are the main villains and Zeus isn’t really likeable either.
But where Percy Jackson was more a fun fantasy movie set in present day in the vain of the Harry Potter movies, Clash Of The Titans goes for the Lord Of The Rings feeling trying to be as epic as possible.
On one hand the set up of the movie is more true to the Greek mythology than Percy Jackson, but Titans uses a lot of influences from other mythologies than just the Greek. You won’t find the Djinn or the Kraken in your Greek history books.
Responsible for the clash is the fact that humans from the Greek city of Argos have declared war against the Gods. The Gods are dependent on the prayers of man for their strength and thus need to be feared and respected. When Hades kills a group of soldiers and decides to also take a simple fishing boat to the depths of the sea the only survivor of the vessel turns out to be the mortal demigod and son of Zeus Perseus, who wants to have revenge on Hades for killing his family. Hades himself gives Argos an ultimatum; sacrifice the princess or he will release the Kraken to destroy the city and its inhabitants. Luckily this ultimatum is seven days so a small army can go on a LOTR style journey to retrieve the one thing that can destroy the Kraken. If I was to demand an ultimatum it would be one hour or so, it’s not that a difficult choice.
Once the journey starts the movie starts to really get rolling after being a little slow the first half hour but once it rolls it does with such a speeds that it practically never stops which makes the movie really feel like the LOTR trilogy with a lot of plot-moments cut out. We get epic battles with giant scorpions, an epic battle with Medusa and as you have seen in the trailer, at one point the Kraken is released resulting in, you guessed it, another epic battle. In between there’s some filler in which Perseus is developing an interest in the good looking Io. Even demigods need some sexy time in between fighting giant monsters.
The movie lacks humor, and it’s something that movies like this need to keep them from taking themselves too seriously which is Clash’s biggest fault. Just look at Liam Neeson in his shiny outfit and try not to laugh. Even Hades is a rather restraint villain and Ralph Fiennes plays him like a blander version of Voldemort with the same hoarse voice. I guess that is his standard evil voice; as hoarse as can be.
On its own Clash Of The Titans is fairly entertaining. Full of special effects which of course look pretty good and with such a high it’s hard to get bored by it. But coming so close after Percy jackson it’s hard to ignore all the similarities. The same villains that were used, and the ones in Percy Jackson did seem to have more character than the ones in Clash. The scene with the ferrymen in both movies is eerily similar as is the way Medusa is defeated. But that is probably due to the source material which is the same for both movies.
If you mashed up these two movies you would probably get a perfectly balanced Greek mythology action movie. Now all we have are two mediocre ones.
