When I was promoting the Tomcast 2020 podcast episode for Clash of the Titans, I mentioned in a few places that neither myself nor my podcast partner Jen seemed to like the movie all that much. A friend of mine, Mike, took issue with that opinion. It’s a favorite movie of his, so how could I hate it?
Except, well, I didn’t hate the movie. True, I didn’t overly like it, but I certainly didn’t hate it. There’s a lot of charm to the original Clash of the Titans. There’s just something to the movie that didn’t make me really get into it. Mike, to his credit, accepted that answer when I basically explained I didn’t see the movie when I was a kid. Mike had, it was one of his childhood favorites, and that more or less explained the whole thing.
Quite frankly, this isn’t the first time I saw a movie long after it came out, a movie a lot of people my age seem to adore for one reason or another, and I just don’t care for it. I had a similar reaction to Top Gun. I am more indifferent to Top Gun than anything else, plus I remembered what Chuck Yeager said about that movie, namely that any pilot who flew the way they did would be shot down. But yeah, Top Gun didn’t work for me.
By contrast, there’s a lot I actually like about Clash of the Titans.
For starters, and most obviously, I really do like Ray Harryhausen’s creature design and the time and effort it went into creating such fantastic special effects. Have they aged well? Maybe not, but I think I took more issue with how well the stop motion characters interacted with the live humans. Something about them makes it look like they don’t quite mesh together. There’s a part of me that suspects, much like with old episodes of Doctor Who, that filming the same stuff in black-and-white might actually improve the appearance of things.
That Medusa scene? It’s really paced well and rather tense, moreso than anything else in the entire movie.
The musical score is great. The script, one that empowers the goddesses in different ways, is pretty good and faithful to the original Greek myth. The cast is good, with a stacked cast of talented actors like Burgess Meredith, Maggie Smith, Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom, Harry Hamlin, Sian Phillips, and especially Laurence Olivier.
So, why don’t I love this one? Well, truth be told, I just don’t think it all comes together well enough. It’s good stuff for what it is, but nothing here says this is an “all time classic”. It’s fine, but not something I feel the need to ever see again. Maybe if I had seen it as a kid, but then again, I was jumpy and easily spooked, so the likelihood of my seeing it as a kid is rather slim regardless. As such, I’m judging not as a nostalgic 80s kid but as a 21st century adult.
Grade: B-
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