NSFCCDP Movie Review: Wrath of the Titans - Good SFX, Bad Acting

This month, 3 brave members of the NSFCCDP – m.poulet, slee, and myself – went to see The Wrath of the Titans. The positive aspects: decent 3D, pretty good special effects, loads of virile fighting scenes, cool cyclops characters, and an excellent labyrinth in Tartarus. The less-than-positive aspects: terrible acting, poor plot and dialog, paper-thin characters, and general sappiness in several places. One thing in particular that bugged me was that although the title of the movie refers to Titans plural, there is only one Titan – Cronos – that actually menaces mankind. Another annoyance was the hokey “save the universe” speech that the hapless Agenor gives to Perseus when they are making their way through the underworld. Completely idiotic. The rigid traditionalism inherent in the father-son brother-brother conflicts also was a bit heavy. Doing a little background research, I can see that the writers took enormous liberties with the story because originally Perseus was married to Andromeda after saving her from the Gorgon plus Heleus was his second son from Andromeda whereas in the film she is his second wife and Heleus is the firstborn to the first wife.  Perhaps, they were rusty on their Ovid or something. The special effects were above average, particularly the aforementioned labyrinth, and the volcano-cum-Cronos at the end. The battle scenes were pretty realistic as well and the monsters were pretty gruesome. If I were to compare it to other films in this genre that I recently reviewed, I’d say that John Carter was far more original but dragged much more than Titans, whereas I think that this film is pretty much even with Cowboys and Aliens. To be honest, I didn’t even bother to watch the original Clash of the Titans and given that m.poulet was adamant about it being a steaming pile of shit and I think we’ll keep it that way. According to wikipedia, this one has already lost the studio almost $40M and I honestly don’t think they are going to recuperate the $$ through DVD sales. I guess that on the strength of SFX, this one gets about a 6, but it really suffered from lack of originality and general suckiness of the character development. Let’s hope that The Avengers in a few weeks makes up for this slight disappointment.

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