I didn’t see Clash of the Titans because the trailers used generic metal-ish music and deliberately edited the movie to make it look like 300 Volume Two. Barf. Plus, I saw Zeus was wearing Iron Man’s suit with the paint buffed off and was all, WTF. However, on my last flight it was the least onerous among the selection of chick flicks and kiddie fare on the entertainment system, so I went for it. I couldn’t finish it because the flight attendants don’t let you wear noise canceling headphones during ascent and descent. (How else am I supposed to avoid hearing those awful safety presentations? JEEZ.) However, I came away with several conclusions:

• This is a shitty remake of a shitty remake of a good story. I don’t think the makers of 2010′s Clash of the Titans even bothered to read the original Greek myth. They just skimmed the script for the 1981 flick and added more strangeness, diluted character motivation, and took unoriginal cheap shots at religion.
• The CG was less impressive than the old-school claymation.
• Pete Postlethwaite was the only dude in the flick who brought it. Everybody else was phoning in their performances, which is understandable as the movie was entirely made up of bit parts.
• I don’t understand why people cast Sam Worthington for parts that aren’t “Henchman #2.” He must have slept with the entire Church of Scientology to be able to keep landing parts in big movies despite having no acting talent whatsoever.
• That metal owl did not need to be seen on screen again, ever.
• I didn’t care about anybody. Nope, nobody. I can’t remember any of the characters’ names except for the ones I know from studying mythology. The two dudes thown in for comic relief provided neither comedy nor relief. I wasn’t sad when anybody died and I wasn’t happy when Andromeda got saved. This was a bland, dull, dazzlingly multinational cast that proved that no matter where you come from and whatever your ethnic background, anybody can be crap at acting. Now isn’t that sweet?

In short, this was not a movie I wanted to see and I hate that I was right when I did see it. There are a few ways this movie could have been something I did want to see:

• Go back to the original story. Don’t remake the ’81 flick — call it Perseus and tell his story. Also, cast somebody as Perseus who doesn’t think that acting means “saying the words written on the script without stuttering.”
• And if you really go back to the original story, you’ll note that Andromeda is the princess of ETHIOPIA. This means she should have been black. Literally every cinematic and artistic interpretation of this story has portrayed Cephus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda as Greek and super white, and all visual representations of Andromeda seem to be manifesting some kind of bizarre fantasy about raping white girls:
  

  white chick.	white chick.	white chick.	white chick.

  So much for Hollywood being post-racial and post-gender. It would have been cool to see this set in ancient Abyssinia, with like, you know, black people. Get some Egyptian-looking duds on the multi-ethnic cast and then you’ll have a truly international epic, not just a pantheon of generic European accents.

• They should have used a scriptwriter who understands that the audience needs a reason to care about the characters, not a rookie and the idiots who unleashed Aeon Flux on us like a case of bad diarrhea. Clash of the Titans put some people on the screen and said, “This is Protagonist Man. You should care about him because he almost died as a baby, and babies are cute so you should care.” It doesn’t work that way. Even good actors like Liam Neeson can’t polish a turd, and this script was a stinky lump of number two.

I doubt the movie I’m imagining will happen because they’re letting these idiots make a second one. Sigh. I keep waiting for the day when Hollywood at large will learn, as those northern rebels at Pixar did, that commercial viability and artistic value are not mutually exclusive concepts. Until then, I’ll be over here translating this post into Latin, as it’s a lot more entertaining than most of what hits theaters . . .