I watched the movie Wrath of the Titans last night, sequel to Clash of the Titans, and was, as usual with these types of films, amused by the mythology used in the movie. I wrote a little Facebook status about it, and then while falling asleep last night, decided to expand on my thoughts and put them into a post, if only for my own benefit.
(To see my response to Percy Jackson, see here).
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| The first post I ever wrote! |
Let me get something straight first: I absolutely enjoyed watching the movie. Had I been wanting to watch it for a while? Yes. Did I think it was a good movie? No. Was I expecting it to be a good movie? No. Would I watch it again? No. Am I glad I saw it? Of course! As someone who enjoys romantic comedies is really just looking for a cute, happy ending between a couple in their films, when I watch an action movie, I'm really just looking for a good fight, not an epicurean masterpiece. It was nothing original, nothing I haven't seen before. Plus, I enjoy seeing adaptions of books, mythologies, whatever. It is incredibly uncommon that I actually regret spending my time watching a certain movie-- M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is a rare example, and I still refuse to see the movie A Wrinkle in Time.
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| I'm with you, Sokka. I'm with you. |
As a movie on it's own, Wrath of the Titans was your average B-/C+ action flick. Perseus's wife Io has just died after ten years (for those familiar with Io's story in Greek mythos, just don't ask; for those familiar with the first movie, I'm just assuming they couldn't get the actress back for some reason), and he is raising a son (named...Helius?) when Zeus-- his father-- comes to him and asks for help because something bad and really really vague is about to happen. Perseus refuses because he doesn't want to leave his son, and Zeus reminds him that as a human, he is stronger than a god, and a few actions scenes later, Perseus has rounded up the old gang (with a new comedic sidekick) and they're off to save Zeus, armed with a mediocre screenplay bathed in CGI, surviving only on the ambrosia that is the relationships between Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Perseus, and sort of Ares. Note: this ambrosia actually makes it an improvement from Clash of the Titans (although the box office earnings would suggest otherwise).
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| Greek mythology does not get any more badass than this. |
This is not a movie review, so I'm not going to spend my time with the plot and quality. What I am interested in is the mythology. I mean for this post to be a reflection. As I said before, I enjoy seeing adaptions of myths, and this was no exception. I had a conversation with someone over the holidays about a movie's right to advertise itself as being based in something true. Zero Dark Thirty was the main subject of our conversation, which is only very loosely based on the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden, but has not advertised itself as being false in any way, which I find disturbing.
As it is, the director of Wrath -- not the same director of Clash-- seems to have, once again, taken a sixth grade mythology class and waited to direct it until he was forty. The Disney movie Hercules had fewer inaccuracies than Wrath, and I can excuse some of those because, well, I wouldn't want my child watching a movie where Zeus cheats on Hera and names the son Heracles after her to try and appease her but she's still so pissed off that she throws his child off of Mt. Olympus, either, where Heracles grows up and kills Meg and then ultimately chooses to live on Olympus instead of Earth.
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| Hell, I don't even mind Hera being pink. |
It doesn't bother me, exactly. I suppose I do cringe when I hear people referring to the movie as a source of mythology-- I love mythology, and Wrath of the Titans is not that. Maybe what gets to me is that there is some hidden implication there that the actual mythology is not interesting enough. I understand some modernizations. I have grown accustomed to the fact that pretty much any movie that does not take pace in modern-day (or futuristic) America will host a cast of English accents, regardless of whether we're in Greece, Persia, or Alagaesia, because British is the only foreign/exotic accent there is. I have also grown accustomed to the fact that the rise of CGI fight scenes mean the rise of more and more outlandish monsters and battles and Michael Bay explosions, and that directorial moves like making Andromeda a warrior-queen is meant to appease the feminists of today.
(I would have inserted a picture here, but you would not believe how much Andromeda fan art there is on Google image, and I refuse to wade through it all just to put one picture here when you can find it yourself)
Fine. Here are some things I don't get:
1. The Chimera at the beginning of the movie look nothing like Chimera. First off, in the film, there were multiple. Secondly, they had wings. Third, it looked very little like a lion/snake/goat hybrid-- I certainly wouldn't have guessed that. The snake, maybe-- the cinematography didn't help me to get a good view of the animal. But what is wrong with the chimera as it was? I'll ignore the fact that Perseus never had anything to do with the Chimera. But, if filmed right, I could easily see a lion/goat/snake hybrid that breathes fire as being scary enough. This is a small detail, but something that I see as being a failure on the part of the filmmakers, because instead of actually exploring the possibilities of having a single fire-breathing Chimera (as described in Hyginus or Pindar), they just change the creature to make it look uglier, more alien, and unclear, and then add more of them because they can't create enough drama with just one.
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| Guys. Guys, this is not a Chimera. |
2. The whole backstory with Kronos. This confuses me for two reasons. One, the actual story with Kronos is way more awesome and crazy than what we saw in the movie. Basically, Ouranos and Gaia (Sky and Earth) have several children-- titans-- including Kronos and Rhea, who have several children (including Hera, Zeus, Demeter, Hestia, Poseidon, and Hades). Kronos then overthrows his father by castrating him (the, um, aftermath of the castration falls into the sea, fertilizes it, and that is how Aphrodite is born), and then, fearing that his own children will overthrow him just as he did his father, he eats them. When Zeus is finally born after everybody else, Rhea wants to protect him, so she gives Kronos a rock to eat instead of the baby, tricking him, and raises Zeus on her own. He then gets his brothers and sisters back when Kronos throws them all back up, and together, they fight a war against Kronos and the other titans, and win, banishing them all into Tartarus. Tartarus is NOT a labyrinth with a Minotaur, but instead a pit, and actually himself a god-brother of Ouranos and Gaia-- so he's actually a being, too.
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| And this is actually a simplified PG version! |
3. The other reason this confuses me is that the reason for all this castration, baby-eating, and banishment is that all of these characters are immortal. Unlike Norse gods, they can't be killed, hence these elaborate and gruesome punishments. They do get weaker when they aren't worshipped, as evidenced by the fact that gods are stronger in their patron cities and their natural element (for example, the conflict between Athena and Poseidon in the Odyssey), and they can get hurt (as Ares was in the Trojan War), but they can't die. Demi-gods can die, Io and Perseus can die, but not the gods. This creates a major plothole-- why was Kronos in Tartarus in the first place? When Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon joined forces to to defeat him in the first place, why would they trap him instead of kill him? Why didn't Kronos kill them in the first place, either?
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| Because the planets were not yet aligned? |
4. The last thing I'll point out is the relationships between the gods. This first got to me when Hephaestus discussed creating the labyrinth. Well, he never did that in the first place (not to mention that, again, Tartarus is actually technically the uncle of Kronos, was around before he was, and is a god as much as he is a place), but Hephaestus also would not have been around then, because Kronos is not his father, Zeus is. In a way, he is also a brother to Ares and Perseus. Since the father/son/brother relationship in this movie was so important, this seems like it could have been an incredibly convenient thing to bring up. Also, he compares the warrior queen Andromeda to his wife, Aphrodite, and this is supposed to be a compliment (Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is married to Hephaestus because Zeus forced her to, and she cheats on him regularly with Ares, to the point where Hephaestus designs a net that catches both of them naked in bed, and invites all the gods to look so they can laugh at her).
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| Lol Hephaestus |
With all this material, why go through all the effort to change it all up to create an entirely new plot? I might go along with it if the newly produced plot had some magnificent twists, wit, meaning, substance, or anything else, but it didn't. Maybe it was simply changed to appeal to a modern-day American audience, but that clearly didn't work, either, given that it's earned, in its entirety (box-office and dvd/blu-ray release combined) less than ninety million dollars. And, obviously, it wasn't supposed to appeal to myth buffs. If it's just supposed to be an action flick with some cool fantasy stuff, I can enjoy it at that level, but then I don't see why they would have changed the original story so elaborately. It's not a great movie. The confusion (and mild disappointment) for me does not come from the fact that the mythology is distorted in the film-- that is to be expected-- but instead, the wild and desperate attempts to make the mythology somehow cooler, crazier, more action-packed and simultaneously more meaningful than it already is, discrediting the original in the process as being dated and unworthy of an honest retelling.
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