Movie Review: RELEASE THE KRAKEN! ... er, Clash of the Titans

I was very disappointed in the new "Clash of the Titans" movie. There wasn't a Titan in it anywhere. There were some gods who had wiped out the Titans to rule Olympus. There was a Kraken who the gods used to wipe out the Titans. But no actual Titans. At least in the original movie they called the Kraken the last of the Titans. So, really, it was "Attack of the Titan".

We saw the 3D version. We didn't mean to. We'd have preferred the 2D version, but we would have had to twiddle our thumbs for an hour first. I should tell you, in the new wave of 3D movies there's only been one 3D live action movie - Avatar. When Pixar or someone like that puts out a 3D digital animation it's fairly easy. They've got a 3D model of everything. They just need to made sure the render farm is set to 3D when they hit the button to finalize things. In live action movies you need to use a special camera. So far only "Avatar" has used it. The rest are broken into several flat layers and those layers are given depth relative to each other. So you have a bunch of 2D cutouts coming at you.

The same is true of "Clash of the Titans". In fact, there's a lot of the movie where you don't need your 3D glasses at all. There's so little dimension that it's not worth bothering. In the rest, the glasses are there to prevent the headache you'd get when the background seems to lose registration.

Enough complaining. Really, it was a good movie. There are points where it seems fast paced/disjointed enough that it would have benefited from having 10-15 minutes put back in. That's complaining, isn't it?

The story was similar to the original, but you felt that the characters had better reasons for why they were doing what they were doing. They're challenging the gods instead of just being played with by the gods. Instead of just one guy going at it alone it's a small military expedition led by the one important guy.

In this movie, a fisherman finds a baby in a floating coffin and raises it. While the grown up kid and his family are fishing, some locals decide to topple a giant statue of Zeus. The locals are attacked by a god with the boat catching some of the spillover from the battle. The kid is rescued and brought to the king. The queen taunts the gods and brings the wrath of Hades on them. He demands the princess Andromeda be sacrificed in 10 days. He also tells the kid that he's the son of Zeus. With his family killed by a god, the kid declares war on the gods and vows to kill the Kraken when it comes to eat the princess.

The special effects were pretty good. I think they would have looked better in 2D.

Dunno if I'll get it on DVD. It's worth seeing, though.