As an aside, I watched the 1981 Clash of the Titans last night while holed up in the house due to lots of falling snow, inability of our infrastructure to clear the roads well, and stuff getting canceled across the board that I would otherwise have been out doing. It's not a great movie, but I've kind of got a soft spot for those old cheesy sword & sandal movies, especially with the stop-motion mythological monsters. I imagine most D&D players kind of do. Now, I might watch the 2010 remake here soon, but even if I don't, I think I can remember well enough why that failed compared to the 1981 version, and much of it comes down to [the following]:
- In the 2010 version, Perseus is kind of whiny and reluctant. I hate the trope of the reluctant hero. Men that women love and other men aspire to be are movers and shakers. Leading men who are passive, or even worse, surly and whiny, just are incredibly unlikable. The Perseus of the earlier version, on the other hand, is happy to go find his destiny; he's even impetuous about it, which gives him a kind of youthful charm.
- In the 2010 version, Andromeda isn't even the love interest. Oh, she's pretty enough, but she's cold, distant, and there's nothing feminine or charming about her at all. (For that matter, the same is mostly true of the actual love interest, some new character played by Gemma Aterton. She's credited as Io, but has absolutely no connection to the mythological Io, so I don't know why.) Judi Bowker's Andromeda, on the other hand, is everything a young princess should be; full of youthful, virginal sweetness, compassion, femininity, and very, very beautiful. When she runs off on her horse in front of the guys, it's not because "I'm a manly pseudo-woman in the feminist vein, here me roar!" it's because she's young, impetuous, in love, and it makes her even more cute and more feminine rather than less so. It's not unlike the famous line from A Princess of Mars; "Fly Sola, Dejah Thoris stays to die with the man she loves." The men react to it fondly. But they protect them, even from themselves, and when Andromeda wakes up to find that everyone except old Burgess Meredith has already left and there's nothing for her to do except go back home, it's sad, but not as sad, reckless or foolish as taking the girl you love into harm's way. These two are where I say that the feminist imperative fights against biology; the story that the feminist imperative would have us tell simply isn't a story that most people are going to react to very well, because it makes men into low-T losers, and it makes women into pseudo-men. Both are off-putting and unlikable at best, and seriously wretched at worst. And then to make it worse, these pseudo-men played by women actresses have plot immunity to even minor setbacks, because the shrieking harpies who write this stuff can't bear to see them suffer even that. So the stories not only feature unbelievable and unlikable characters, but they also feature unlikable, boring plots with no real tension or suspense.
- Poor Sam Worthington is probably a decent guy, but I've never yet seen him in a movie where he had any charisma or chemistry with the other actors. Harry Hamlin, on the other hand, isn't a particularly talented actor, but even so, he had a kind of dumb jock charm, and it was credible that Perseus and Andromeda were victims of young love.
- On the other hand, the 2010 version had much better special effects, and usually better action sequences (although I actually think the Medusa scene works better as a tense horror scene than as an action scene, so 1981's version actually wins there. By a little bit.)
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