Well, everything else is being remade, so why not this? For those of you not in the know, this movie is a REMAKE of the last film Ray Harryhausen already made. Much has been made about Harryhausen and his career on this blog, so I won't go into the details again. Let's just say that yes, the effects are nice in this movie. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the action sequences.
So, this one is a little different from the original. Instead of being the Gods' puppets, we now have the humans versus the Gods. It seems that the Gods resent the fact the humans aren't praying to them anymore, and the humans don't like the fact they have to pray. Or whatever. Enter Hades, who proposes that the Gods punish the humans for their insubordination (he's basically taking over the Maggie Smith role from the old film), and threatens to unleash the Kraken on Argos, unless Andromeda (who is hardly in the film) is sacrificed. Our man Perseus, embarks on a journey to find a way to stop this from happening.
So less Andromeda, and now we have Io (who is the old Andromeda character and the Burgess Meredith character rolled into one), who serves as the pseudo-love interest. Calipos is no longer a creature, but the king who condemned Perseus to death in the first place, with half his face blown off by Zeus for doing so. We do have the Stygian witches, Charon, the Kraken, and my personal fave, Medusa (who is the best thing in this whole movie), and giant scorpions, as well as a Djinn, so don't worry creature fans, you haven't been neglected.
I really liked the designs on the creatures. The giant scorpions are...well...giant scorpions, the Kraken looks awesome, the witches are amazing, and Medusa is downright sick. I would have preferred Pegasus being white instead of chocolate brown, and I was not impressed that Calipos got the shaft, both storyline and design wise, but hey, we did get some pretty good stuff, there. The sets are amazing too, Zeus' throne room is really neat, and of course, the temples, desert and Medusa's lair all have the proper atmosphere.
What really let me down in this film is the action scenes, and that's really big for this type of movie. It's weird that they got most of the character designs spot-on, which you would think would be the hard part of the film, but the action scenes, which I consider easier, blew. Why? Guess. That's right. I had no friggin' idea what was going on in the scenes. Like, none. Which is pretty sad, when you consider it's a human versus a giant scorpion, how is it possible that I can't tell who hit what? It also doesn't help that all the humans look the same (okay, when I said character design, I meant the creatures...no one cares what the humans look like, so long as they aren't wearing something stupid, like pink feathers), which was a definite mistake, visually. Since they went to pains to sort out the humans personality-wise (or about as much character destinction as you are to get in a film of this sort), why not give them little touches to separate them visually? Nope. Fast cuts, zoomed-in hits...I have no idea what's going on, half the time. The only part that didn't suck was the Medusa section...and that's only because it's mostly Medusa chasing people around, or sneaking up on people. Hard to screw that up.
So yeah, other than the action scenes, this film is really fun. You have cool-looking creatures, you have a quest, you have square-jawed good guys, a bad guy who travels around as smoke, and turns into flying creatures (!!!), and you have bits and pieces of mythology. All good. If the action scenes were proper, this would have been 4.5 to 5 stars, but alas, I can only give out 3.5 due to this.
Rating 3.5 out of 5 stars.
I bid thee a fond clash
- Stephenstein
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