Grade: D-
I’m going to go ahead and spoil the best part of Clash of the Titans for you: it happens just after the movie has ended when the final title screen appears, highlighted with brightly sparking electricity. This is the best scene for two reasons: the lightening-infused letters are cheesy but decidedly old-school, like the film Titans is a remake of. The main reason this is the movie’s best scene is that it means the movie is over, and the two hour murder of both cinema and Greek mythology that I have been watching in horror has drawn to a close.

Yeah, so I didn’t like this movie, but I might be a special case. I was taught Greek mythology from a very early age-concurrently, in fact, with stories like Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella. I loved the Greek myths, and as a result I grew to hate most of the movies, games, and books that branched off of them, as they were usually grossly inaccurate. I can’t even watch Disney’s Hercules without getting pissed off. Zeus is shown as having a loving relationship with his wife Hera (fun fact: they’re also brother and sister), when in reality Zeus was the Charlie Sheen of mythological deities, in that he was single-handedly responsible for nearly every pregnancy in Greek history. So being a Greek-Myth purist, this movie might have been ruined for me from the start. I’m sure plenty of people will say that they enjoyed this movie, shortly before being dragged out of the theater for trying to dig through the floor in search of the lost city of Moletopia; such people undoubtedly suffer from severe brain-damage

The setup of the movie is as simple as it is generic: long ago, during the war between Cronos’s army of Titans and Zeus’s army of Gods, Zeus commissions Hades to create the Kraken from his own flesh to destroy the Titans, as well as ruin the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. When the war is over, Zeus rewards Hades for his hard work by screwing him over and making him ruler of the Underworld, a realm that is slightly less depressing than reading the list of books Twilight has outsold, but still pretty gloomy. As a result, Hades nurses a grudge to take down Zeus and claim his rightful place as the main character of this horrid mess, although if I were him I’d just stay in the Underworld. It’s where the careers of most people involved in this monstrosity are headed anyway, so he could just show them Clash of the Titan’s Rottentomatoes score and get his revenge that way. Oh, and nice job making Death the villain, by the way. Edgy.

So flash-forward a few hundred years, and Perseus, one of Zeus’s myriad sons, is sailing with his foster-dad out on the open seas when Hades sends in some monsters to punish some humans for knocking down a statue of Zeus, and Perseus’s only family is killed in the crossfire. Already pissed off, Perseus’s mood doesn’t exactly improve when the Queen, being drunk, stupid, and utterly one dimensional, remarks that it’s now the age of man, and that her daughter is totally cool enough to be worshipped as a God. She goes on to refer to each and every one of the Gods as “total pussies” and remarks that “only, like, complete losers” don’t dramatically appear and demand her daughter’s sacrifice to the Kraken. Hades responds by dramatically appearing and demanding that Andromeda be sacrificed to the Kraken, a plot twist so shocking it leaves Andromeda’s mother completely speechless. “Acting like a total asshat to beings who can kill me with a fart and are notoriously vain and short-tempered has negative consequences? What madness is this?” her scared, poorly-characterized eyes seemed to say. And so Perseus volunteers to partake in a suicide mission to find some way to defeat the Kraken, leaving the town to puzzlingly call for the sacrifice of the fair-tempered, reasonable Andromeda and not the stupid, short-sighted idiot queen who caused this whole catastrophe. These people need a strong, manly Greek leader not afraid to kick people into death-pits and march into battle wearing a thong.

One of the most irritating (albeit pettiest) gripes I have with this movie is its title. There are absolutely no Titans in this movie, and the most epic clash is not the fight between Perseus and the Kraken, but rather between the writing and interpretation of Greek Mythology, which are fighting over who’s more mediocre. Really, this movie should be called Look! Look! We Have the Guy from Avatar fighting a Squid!, as the movie’s crappiness constantly reminds you that they cared far more about that than, say, any form of actual quality. For example, Zeus, despite knowing that Perseus and the rest of his crew’s stated objective is to destroy the Gods and everything they stand for, decides that he should arm the blood-thirsty scamp with various magical weapons and gadgets. That makes sense, right? Arming someone whose stated intention is to kill you with the most powerful tools you can give them? Even ignoring the fact that giving the gifts makes no sense, the movie couldn’t even give Perseus the gifts he actually got in the myth, where Zeus and him are best pals. At one point-I swear to Christ this is real-Perseus receives a lightsaber. I repeat: Perseus, ancient Greek hero, son of Zeus, is going to fight gorgons and harpies with a lightsaber. A white one. If they were going to rip off Star Wars anyway, they could have at least made it a good color.

Just as questionable is the choice of Io as Perseus’s love interest. First of all, Zeus and Io were having non-consensual sex way before Perseus was born, so considering that Zeus is Perseus’s dad, that situation has to be a teensy bit awkward. More pressingly, the movie changed Hera’s punishment towards Io for daring to be the victim of Zeus’s repeated sexual assault: Io, rather than being turned into a cow as in the myths, was instead cursed with immortal life. The horror! Giving her a trait usually reserved for relatives of the Gods or great heroes as a punishment! And she could have been turned into hamburger, too! I know I’d much rather be forced to crap where I stood and milked thrice a day than be young and beautiful forever.

In terms of acting, it matches the rest of the movie, in that it sucks and I hate it. The two big-name actors-Liam Neeson as Zeus and Sam Worthington as Perseus-decide to phone it in and hold in their emotions until they can have a temper tantrum with their agents for hooking them up with such a God-awful film. Everyone else is straight-up awful. The rest of Perseus’s friends are forgettable at best, and (in the case of two “hilarious” comic-relief mercenaries) most notable for confusing “funny accents and yelling” with “acting, characterization, and not being gigantic reminders of the poor quality of the film.” A special shout-out must go to Hades, whose performance as an evil mastermind is so unsubtle and hackneyed that I think he actually would have done quite well if given a suitably sinister moustache to twirl, and maybe a monocle.

Overall, Clash of the Titans comes off as a film that thinks that characterization, story, and mythological accuracy should take backseat to boring CG scorpions, boring fights with Perseus’s second dad (who’s a zombie, don’t ask), and one, really long, boring fight with the Kraken. The original 1981 film that of which this is a remake suffers most of the same problems, but its generic action sequences use awesome stop-motion skeletons, so it is clearly the superior film.

Don’t see this movie. Don’t even pirate this movie, because in order for that to happen, somebody else will have had to have seen the movie to film it. The best way to approximate the experience of this two hour abomination is to bang your head against a wall until you start to see cracks, then play through the opening levels of God of War 3 on hard difficulty with your controller upside-down, and then watch the last ten minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest while letting a bird fly around near the TV and poop on everything. The more you cry, the more accurate it is. The only way this movie could possibly be worse is if they gave Sam Worthington a Hitler moustache, named the Kraken Winston Churchill, and called it Triumph of the Will 2: the Revengening.

Oh, and whoever played that one guy with the giant forehead zit who keeps whining about how great Hades is needs to be found and placed in some sort of Bad Actor Prison. Maybe real prison if one hasn’t been built yet.