His eyes! My god, look at his eyes!
Actually, a Clash of the Titans review, which I saw last night. Not my favorite movie of the year.
The movie COULD have been good. It's a remake of a cheesy but pretty decent movie. Get a good cast, trim the script down with what worked, add some new stuff, throw in modern effects...
Brief side note - Ray Harryhausen did fantastic, beautiful stopmotion work. The Medusa scene in the original is just plain scary and suspensful, I don't care what anyone says - and any fool with a computer can do the equivalent these days.
Anyway, you can do a nice remake of an adventure piece by epicing it up. But that's it a remake - instead this time, it's a sort of battle against the gods (for some reason, it's not clear why, if Zeus is somehow in the non-smiting camp) - and they still kept Perseus getting a lot of cool stuff from the Gods, and needing the Gods help and... well, if you're trying to adapt a film where the Gods helped and gave the usual hero items, and change it to against the Gods and keep the... well, your narrative gets confused. Also it changes the point from the original, so go figure. There's a bunch of other changes, maybe the most important is that Perseus is a foundling, his mother not surviving the box. Arabian Nights-style figures showing up at one point and just happen to have equipment ready to (in the most unintentionally funny sequence) to be able to ride blood-spawned hellbeasts. I'm giggling now thinking about it, it's so out of nowhere. Oh, and let's not forget the big change: Hades is standing in for Satan. And he made the Kraken somehow. And the other gods don't really show up (no Athena lending assistance) That's a fairly significant shift from the original and mythos. Guys, seriously.
The music was weird - it was good, but it was almost always the wrong score for the scene - the happy ending scene had dramatic 'something is about to leap out at you' music is just the easiest example to remember, some scenes had happy music for no reason... It just felt off.
Weird things not kept - we knew Medusa could turn you to stone but the first movie showed her in silhouette several times including in a real 'oh crap' moment, she had a bow and could attack from a distance too. Here, we hear hissing, and she just shows up with the bow. Also - no Bupo, the film could've used a little more levity. Weirdly, with the Gods being supposed to be trouble, they kept out the pretty-nasty scene from the original where Zeus crushes the figure of Perseus's mother's husband, killing him horribly below. How could that not work in a 'battle against the Gods' style.
Okay, that's not accurate, something resembling Bupo shows up in the armory but they leave it behind. I miss the owl.
And, to explain the title - Sam Worthington, miscast as Perseus, refused to let any expression actually touch his eyes. He acted better as a big blue motion-capture, and thanks to Avatar's success, we're going to see a lot of him being sullen for a while.