Clash of the Humans

Ray Harryhausen geek that I am, I saw the remake of Clash of the Titans this morning (first day in the theaters, first show, first customer in the door). It wasn’t utterly horrible. The special effects were generally cool--I especially liked the slow build to the Kraken’s emergence--and they managed to preserve most of the creatures from the original: Medusa, of course (a snake hybrid as in Harryhausen’s conception), Pegasus (black instead of white, and fluidly animated; but then again, so was Harryhausen’s model), the giant scorpions, Charon, Calibos (though he was played by a man in makeup, with no special effects, and with a drastically different history than in the 1981 film). They even threw in Bubo (the original model, I’ve heard) for a cameo. It was too violent--a real problem for me since my six-year-old son is desperate to see it--and the actor who played Perseus, Sam Worthington, was completely unconvincing as the son of a god. But it was fun in a silly sort of way, and given how high my expectations were, I wouldn’t say the filmmakers let me down too much.

One thing, though, that I found puzzling in the film--and this takes me back to my earlier post about the Percy Jackson movie that came out a couple months ago--was its addition of a plot element that’s nowhere to be found in the original, not to mention in the mythic source materials: war between gods and mortals. I won’t go into the details (they’re too convoluted to trace anyway), but suffice it to say that the plot is set in motion by humanity’s determination to cast off divine oppression, and that the ensuing events arise in the form of the gods’ retaliation against such monumental sacrilege. This is basically the plot of the Percy Jackson movie--gods versus people--and it’s pretty close to the plot of last year’s blockbuster 2012 (divine prophecy results in end of the world) and of another movie from earlier this year, Legion (God sends angels to wipe out humanity; humanity fights back with lots of really cool guns). The tagline of Clash of the Titans is “Damn the Gods,” and that pretty accurately sums up this new genre of what we might call antideity fantasy.

I call it “antideity” and not “atheist” because, of course, it assumes the presence of a God or gods as humanity’s antagonist. And it makes you wonder: why are we so ticked off at the gods all of a sudden? What did they ever do to us? Any film that relies on this plot element automatically renders itself ridiculous: after all, the gods are gods, and by definition we mortals can’t win a war against them no matter how cool our swords or guns may be. So we must be really keen to tangle with them if we’re willing to court ridiculousness in so doing. Is it that we feel particularly aggrieved right now--that the collapse of so many world systems (economic, environmental, political, international) is making us feel as if malign, omnipotent powers are indeed toying with us? Or is it, as I suggested in my earlier post, that blaming the gods gets us off the hook? (Perseus’s adoptive human father, a shaggy, confused-looking Pete Postlethwaite, curses the gods when his fishing nets keep coming up empty. They’re coming up empty for us too, but that’s because we’ve overfished all the world’s waters.) Maybe the gods stand in for mortal enemies: our own indifferent government, the heartless corporations that run so much of our lives. Maybe, deep down, when we curse the gods we’re really cursing ourselves.

The moment everyone was waiting for--it’s almost worth the price of admission--is when Liam Neeson’s Zeus thunders to Ralph Fiennes’s Hades, “Release the Kraken!” It’s got an operatic quality to it, and also an Oppenheimer quality. For in the beast’s elemental fury against human civilization we see, as in a mirror, the truth: it is we, not the gods, who have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Ye Gods!

I saw the first Percy Jackson movie with my daughter today (she's a big fan, and we've been reading the books together, having completed the Harry Potter series last year). For those who haven't heard of it, the conceit behind the Percy Jackson series is that the gods of Olympus are very much alive and well; they've settled in America (for some reason having to do with their affinity for freedom or world dominance or something like that); and they've continued to parent half-blood children like young Percy, son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. In the first book, The Lightning Thief, Percy discovers his lineage and embarks on a quest to find the lightning bolt Zeus believes he's stolen. If he doesn't return it to Zeus by the summer solstice, immortal warfare will ensue and the world as we know it will probably cease to exist.

The book isn't bad, rather hip and arch and American, very unlike the stolidly British HP series. The author, Rick Riordan, is a somewhat better stylist than J. K. Rowling; he says more with less. And Percy, though he's essentially a demigod version of Harry--an abandoned, lonely child who discovers he's actually the most important person in an alternative world he hadn't known existed--is an appealing character, his pre-teen angst convincingly drawn and his quest to find his godly father and vanished mother emotionally resonant.

The movie wasn't half bad either--my daughter scored it a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, and that's about where I'd have put it too--though of course it weeded out much of the interesting plot and character development in favor of strangely unconvincing CG monsters and frenetic car chases. Its deepest problem was that there was no real sense of urgency to Percy's quest; though we were told that divine warfare would decimate the planet, the most the movie could muster to suggest this threat was a bizarre storm cloud that slowly expanded till it covered most of North America. Maybe it's just me, but big dark computer-generated clouds don't exactly give me the heebie-jeebies.

Watching that cloud, though, I did wonder why the Olympian gods are back this year--not only in The Lightning Thief but in the soon-to-be-released remake of the 1981 Ray Harryhausen classic Clash of the Titans. Maybe it's no more than the perpetual fascination of these timeless myths, which I devoured as hungrily as any child from age 7 to 14. Or maybe it's our equally perpetual need for otherworldly explanations to the troubles of our own time; maybe that looming stormcloud signifies our anxieties concerning such god-sized problems as the economic crash, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of our planet's climate.

Fantasy, as I've argued in other posts, points both toward and away from the cultural crises of its time; it tells us what we're worried about while simultaneously telling us there's no need to worry. So instead of global warming we get warring godheads. Instead of war in this world we get the war of the worlds. Instead of corporate thieves we get lightning thieves. It's a handy trick; it may even be a necessary one. Who can face the realities of life without a little fantasy? Who can resist calling on the gods, beseeching their aid, cursing them for our fate?

In the myth of Perseus, the hero defeats Medusa by watching her reflection in his shield, thus avoiding direct contact with her petrifying gaze. Fantasy is like that: it shows us the horrors of the real world as if in a mirror, and in so doing places us at a safe distance from them. But in doing so, of course, it also gets them backward.