Clasherific! Moves along at a Krakening pace...

Clash of the Titans 2010 remake US

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Screening at Cineworld

You know... I always liked the movies of Ray Harryhausen. Sinbad fighting the cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Jason fighting the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. Sinbad fighting the statue of Kali while Caroline Munro looked on in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. All these were great memories for me so, when the time came to go and see Harryhausen’s new venture Clash of the Titans back in 1981, this teenage boy was ready to rock. Unfortunately, when I came out of the cinema 29 years ago...  I left feeling disappointed at having seen what was probably Harryhausen’s least interesting movie. The only consolation was the robot owl standing in as a kind of ancient Greek R2D2 and that cheeky shot of Judy Bowker rising up from the bathtub... which left a definite impression in the mind of this 13 year old at the time.

So frankly... when I heard that Hollywood were doing a modern remake of this my first thoughts were... a) You can’t remake a Harryhausen movie with any of the charm that the great man himself would have brought to the formula and b) it seriously wasn’t worth trying to revive the corpse of this lifeless movie anyway.

When I heard it was going to have some post-production 3D added, I was even less impressed (3D is the BluRay of cinema right now... they’re just looking for more ways to charge you more money).

And so now, I’m going to make a total fool of myself in the wake of some exceptionally negative criticism of the film and say to you right here and now that the new version of Clash of the Titans isn’t just faithful to the original movie in many ways... it is so much better than the original and everything I would have wanted to see in that darkened cinema back in 1981!

This film is old time 50s and 60s Hollywood epic with masses of action thrown in for good measure. The small, cliched character sketches of the men accompanying Perseus actually work really well and the movie runs along at a Krakening... sorry... cracking pace with some great special effects and creature design. Well okay, so I didn’t like the design of the Kraken much... and I didn’t like the fact that Pegasus is black... but everything else from Charon to the Djinn and the giant scorpions is aces. There’s even a brilliant cameo appearance by the Bubo the R2D2 owl I mentioned earlier... looking exactly as he did in the original movie.... only better animated. And as for Medusa the Gorgon... well she’s really beautiful and looks like she’s just stepped out of one of the works of Alphonse Mucha. I’d hang out with her anytime.

And it’s got Gemma Arterton in it! Yum.

All in all a great movie for kids and adult fans of “high adventure”. Don’t miss out on this one. It’s clasheriffic!