Not the 2010 remake. It would take nothing short of a long plane ride with a poor entertainment menu to get me to watch that. Instead, in my quest for a summer-type viewing, I decided not to let Jason and the Argonauts be my only taste of Ray Harryhausen.
Perseus (Harry Hamlin), as a favored mortal bastard son of Zeus (Laurence Olivier), has grown up in peace. But through no fault of his own, sea goddess Thetis (Maggie Smith) has a bone to pick with him. He suddenly finds himself teleported to a kingdom where anyone courting the princess, Andromeda (Judi Bowker), must answer a riddle or burn to death. Already smitten with her, Perseus uses divine material gifts and the help of friends, including poet Ammon (Burgess Meredith), to protect her -- first from her former fiance, Thetis's son Calibos (Neil McCarthy), who forces her to ask the riddles, and then from Thetis's wrath in the form of the Kraken.
Yeah, that least detail replaces Cetus with a monster out of Norse mythology, probably for no other reason than to showcase Harryhausen's work better. In fact, there don't appear to be any characters traditionally identified as Titans. My memory of lessons on Perseus alone indicated that this telling takes quite a few liberties, albeit not as many as Hercules.
At least we still get a sense of Greek gods being jerks, as with disproportionate and displaced retribution. Calibos, while invented for this film, makes for an aptly tragic figure. After hunting too much of the wrong quarry, he got cursed to a demonic shape, and that alone was enough to quench Andromeda's love for him. Even Perseus takes some pity on him, making him almost the Gollum of the piece. Thetis is sure that Zeus would not have given his own son such a raw deal, but we know of no comparable sin by Perseus. (He does enter a sleeping stranger's bedroom and admire her beauty, but that's the extent of it.)
I found myself thinking of The Odyssey at times. Aside from familiar names and whatnot, we get a hero losing companions left and right to horrible deaths on his quest. For the most part, we don't know their names, and Perseus is in too much of a hurry to mourn them properly.
CotT gets some distinction for being the one Harryhausen picture with a PG rating. I suppose that's inevitable when the story requires a severed head on screen, but there's also unnecessary exposure of women's breasts and buttocks in a couple scenes -- not including a scene where it would have been both authentic and important, oddly enough. Funny how the UK has handled alleged family fare.
The visuals? Let me put it this way: It got no Oscar nod but was nominated for a Stinker award for Least "Special" Special Effects. Perhaps that had something to do with a release 18 years after JatA, when stop action fests had fallen out of favor. The action feels pretty slow and, of course, choppy. And the hellhound has only two heads to save on resources.
In truth, I think the worst visual aspects aren't Harryhausen's fault. For example, Poseidon (Jack Gwillim) and the Kraken gate's opening mechanism look totally pasted into the shot. And during a Pegasus flight, I actually saw two background walkers vanish and reappear in a loop. Did the editor fall asleep?
But nothing hurt my excitement more than predictability. For all the deviations from myth, even if I had never known any version of the story, it wouldn't be hard to guess how Perseus handles one danger after another. The gods have pretty well laid out a path for him, and he never lacks the courage to follow it. The final "clash" can hardly be called a climax, because we're warned exactly what to expect, a certain extra flourish notwithstanding. I'm just glad they rewrote the Medusa confrontation for a modicum of inventiveness.
This is not to say that I couldn't enjoy the action at all. It gets conceptually engaging in its, well, epic scope. And when it falls short, I can concentrate on the humor, intended or not. My personal favorite element is what I dub "Robo-Bubo," a mechanical duplicate of Athena's pet owl made to guide Perseus and lend aerial support.
I can see why CotT would get remade, but I can also guess why the remake would fail. It's best appreciated as a quaint relic of a bygone era. Kinda like Greek mythology itself.
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