Convince me otherwise: Clash Of The Titans is going to be the worst movie of '10

I keep seeing the spots for Clash Of The Titans. Yikes.

Other than the "release the Cracken!" line, which cracks me up, because I had a dream once where I was in ancient Greece and stared out into a harbor and said just as dramatically, "Behold! The Cracken!", this remake looks like absolute gutter trash.

It's not even that I have any affinity for the original. A toga-ed Harry Hamlin as the hero, with all kinds of Brit legend old farts making cameos and weak-ass Harryhausen effects? Yeah. Even if I were in my most nostalgic mood, I could never work up any kind of love for that crapburger.

My animosity towards this current version is twofold. One, it looks like someone barfed CGI all over the Parthenon. CGI has become so ubiquitous that almost no movie that depends largely on it looks good. The technology hasn't advanced to the point where it doesn't look cheap.

But my main problem is this scream-coreization of action movies in general, for lack of better way to put it. Loads of idiotic sound and fury signifying nothing or at least nothing that isn't a CGI effect. It's like someone decided to make movies based on the concept of a weight room grunt.

The story arcs seem to be completely set up for these dramatic utterances by the protagonists.

"THIS IS THE AGE OF MAN!"

Black Sabbath was more restrained and realistic with the vocoderized intro to Iron Man. Beavis and Butthead had it right 15 years ago when they watched an early scream-core metal video on the show, "Sounds like he's taking a shit."

This movie, like a few of its predecessors, is usually shot in a stylized, poorly lit sepia-ish tone which cinematopgrahers have made into a pro forma "ancient bad ass" style, a la 300, the stupid fucking movie that started this shit.

Ooh! It's shot just like a graphic novel! Christ. While you're pounding your pud with one hand, knock me over with a feather with the other.

What else? There's the skin that would be considered gratuitous enough to get a PG-13, enough to get those who are so easily titillated to whack off to Maxim or who paint scantily-clad vixens at the feet of a sword-wielding Thor on their Econoline vans, but not the real nudity to get the R.

Apparently, this movie in development since 2002, pretty much the high sign that there's no united vision (of a remake?) and that it will be a muddled mess.

If the plot is faithful to the '81 movie, it's going to suck, especially if they bring back that robotic owl, a character which synthesized the annoying aspects of R2-D2 from Star Wars and gave one a strong desire to kick an owl in the nuts. The special effects will suck. Sweaty Greek man screaming at me in sepia-tone suck. Liam Neeson bathed in a holy light as Zeus clearly sucks and just might awaken the real Greek gods as they return to wreak an ancient vengeance.

Release the cracken!

 

As long as "Release the cracken!" doesn't portend an old guy in a thong, it can't be that bad.

 

Yeah, this movie looks like it will be complete shit. It looks so bad I probably won't catch it until 3 a.m. on a Tuesday night when it's on TNT or TBS

 

The stop action animation in the original lends it all the charm it deserves. It's quaint.

Probably no reasonably high-concept film from the last 35 years has aged so poorly.

 

And somehow, they still got Lawrence Olivier to participate ...

 

Olivier worked in a lot of crapburger movies if the check was right.

 

Wait, you meant that giant scorpion wasn't real?

This is one of those movies that was on constant rotation on Showtime, so I know it well.

Also, was anybody else kind of turned on by the Medusa chick in kind of a weird way? Um, yeah, me neither.

Here's a pic of 2010 Clash of the Titans medusa:



Hmmm.

 

Sepia-toned she-snake! Movie gold!

 

Great movie. Seriously. No way it gets on the worst movie of 2010 list. In fact, I'm willing to be it makes more "Best of 2010" lists than the other way around.

Seriously. It was awesome.

 

Neck and neck with "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time." Jake Gyllenhall (sp? don't care). Really?