The 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans is a fun movie, with some interesting hat-tips to modern RPG theological theories and excellent monsters; it is, moreover, a vast improvement on the original. Of course it butchers the original greek myth, but who cares about that? Greek myths are there to be fiddled with.

This movie follows a pretty straightforward story: mortals are rebelling against the gods, refusing to pray to them, and so Zeus allows Hades to extract vengeance on them, ostensibly to force them to again pray to the gods for salvation. Hades has his own plans and the reprisals turn into a cunning scheme by Hades to overthrow Zeus; but Zeus’s demi-god half-son, Perseus, is loose in the world and has a strong desire to kill the gods, so everyone’s schemes get thrown into disarray. During his adventures Zeus gets to fight some giant scorpions, medusa, some harpy-like demons, and the kraken.

There’s an interesting role-playing style twist, in which the Gods depend on human’s prayers for their existence and power, so the humans attack them by simply … going on strike. This is very much like some old ideas from the nerd-o-sphere, in which Gods’ power is directly related to the number and fervour of their followers. This movie takes that concept to its logical conclusion, and it’s nice to see.

Perseus is played well by Sam Worthington, essentially reprising his wtf ?! role from Terminator 4 (but with a better director). To me he comes across as strongly Australian in this movie, and he also plays Perseus’s rebellious streak very well. I have a suspicion that Sam Worthington can’t act anything outside of a kind of dumb-innocent-soldier-guy, but he does that role well, so it fits in here nicely.

The special effects in this movie are excellent and fit in well with the story. They’re not overblown and they really feel natural a lot of the time. The pegasus, particularly, is good. The Kraken is well done by being just glimpsed – there’s no point where you can see the whole of the thing, which adds to the sense of its monumental size and power. The Stygian witches are really cool, simultaneously coquettish, grotesque and savagely dangerous, and Perseus deals with them well. The inclusion of a chaos/Hades cult in Argos is a nice touch, as is the role Aio plays in directing Perseus along his path.

Also, they ditched the stupid clockwork owl.

Overall this movie is a fun bastardization of various greek myths in the interests of killing shit. If you want to see how to kill a god, Princess Mononoke remains the standard; but if you want to see how to kill a bunch of really nasty god-like stuff, rebelliously rather than implacably, this movie is your thing. Also, if you like men in skirts.