Clash Of The Somethings.

So to get this blog rolling it’ll be hard to beat a review of the Clash of the Titans remake that came out this year.  The original was made in 1981 and produced by Ray Harryhausen; the second was made in 2010 and had Harryhausen as a ‘creative consultant’.

I want to start by saying I am a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen and his work.  The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is one of my all-time favourite movies (and boasts my favourite film scene EVER) and I loved Clash of the Titans back in the day.  Harryhausen was an undisputed master of his craft.  That being said, I was not disappointed/offended/outraged when I learned that ‘Titans’ was getting the CG treatment.  While I loved the original, and the stop motion was brilliant, I’ve often dreamed of seeing it made with a touch more ‘realism’. 

Okay, rant time.  The name.  I know, it makes a certain amount of sense from a marketing standpoint, and I guess you could argue an alternate use of the word, but come on: this is Greek mythology we’re playing with here, and THERE ARE NO GODSDAMNED TITANS IN THE MOVIE.  Semantics, I know.  But I live for semantics, especially where this business is concerned, or this blog wouldn’t exist.  And not that I should really complain, since the movie plays pretty fast and loose with mythology anyway (see below).

Pros:

This film was almost a straight port from the original.  That means a lot of the 80s camp and cheese that made the original so much fun was brought forward.  It was played straight, of course, but you can still feel it.  Aside from a few minor tweaks to the script most of the story is intact.  The dialogue is about what you’d expect from a ‘period’ action movie – snappy and excessively dramatic (Liam ‘Zeus’ Nesson’s line “Release the Kraken!” has already been internet meme’d to death).  The CG is pretty good.  I thought Medusa was really well done and the Cloverfield monst—er, I mean the Kraken was less gorilla-like than Harryhausen’s, which I appreciated.  The scorpion battle was a bit over-the-top, but in an Indiana-Jones-mine-car-chase kind of way (that’s a good thing).  Overall it was fun, action-ridden, loud, and unapologetic.

Cons:
My biggest beef was the mistreatment of Bubo.  I appreciated the nod, and can understand why the producers/directors might have thought that a goofy mechanical owl that sounded like R2D2 underwater might not translate well to modern audiences.  I just didn’t like the way he was tossed aside.  It’s silly, I know, but I think that the fans of the original deserve a little more respect. 

I didn’t get the Djinn.  I mean I know they were a plot device, but what the heck were they doing in Greece?  I mean you could argue that they were hangin’ out around the Underworld… but the Greek Underworld (like many) was in the West and the Djinn (an Arabic myth) would have been from the East.  Also I’m not sure why they looked like trees.

Calibos… okay, I’m glad he didn’t have a pube fro like the original, but come on, he looked like the Sasquatch from those beef jerky commercials.  And why was Zeus shot in 70s porn lighting?  The Stygian witches were ridiculous, and did I mention the fact that THERE ARE NO TITANS?

So my overall rating is 3/5.  Good action, great visuals, but no heart – exactly the opposite of the original. 

And now: “Who the Fuck Is This Perseus Character, Anyway?” or “Clash of the Marginally Related Myths”.

Perseus is probably most famous for killing Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon of the three.  Pegasus sprang up from her blood (that happens a lot in Greek myths) but as Perseus had these nifty winged sandals he never actually rode the flying horse – that was Bellerophon, the guy who killed the Chimaera.  Perseus did in fact rescue Andromeda from a Poseidon-sent (NOT Hades-sent) sea monster, but his name was Cetus, not ‘the Kraken’.

Incidentally, ‘Kraken’ is Scandinavian and the so-named beast comes from the legends of that area.

And last but not least, the Titans were godlike beings whom Zeus and his siblings overthrew to become gods over men – and not a single damn one of them appears in either the original or the remake.

Genesis.

Geekenstein's Monster is a hybrid mish-mash of mythology, folklore, Classical stuff and general oddity, sewn together in a hideous mockery of life.  It is a hybrid animal, part anthropology and part technology.  Formerly known as Castle Geekenstein and the House of Geekenstein, this sad little blog wandered lonely and lost through the vast deserts of the Internet Wasteland until it happened upon a sphinx sitting by the side of the road.  And as sphinxes are wont to do, this one asked a riddle:

"Little blog, what is it that has been around for millions of years but is no more than a month old?"

At first the blog thought the riddle referred to itself, as it felt like it had been around forever but was constantly being deleted and re-written.  But then it realized the riddle's correct answer, gave it to the sphinx, and was let free.  And so it came to settle here, and is as you see it today.

Enjoy.