Ultimate Geek Fu

 
Clash of The Mighty Mega-Remakes

---

Right off, I have to admit to feeling torn. As longtime readers know, I am an utter and absolute fan of the work of Ray Harryhausen, stop-motion animator extraordinaire. So much of this collective vision we know as fantastic cinema owes its very existence to the long, long, long hours put in by Mr. Harryhausen, working alone or with never more than one or two assistants, building tiny armatures, covering them with fur and skin, and then bringing them to life one tedious frame at a time. Position the model. Click the shutter. Slightly change the position of the model. Click the shutter again. Twenty-four exposures make up one second of running time; 1,440 frames make a minute; a hundred thousand or more might be required to make Mighty Joe Young come alive for a feature movie. And then to do it all over again the next year, for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, It Came From Beneath The Sea, Earth vs The Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island, First Men in the Moon... The list goes on and on, for more than thirty years of unforgettable movie magic.

And yet his last film, Clash of the Titans, was such a total load of crap. Never before was an all-star cast more completely unnecessary. Never before was Sir Laurence Olivier squandered so badly. (Well, excepting perhaps in The Betsy.) Never before did a movie take such totally weird, Hollywoody liberties with the gods of Greek mythology and the story of Perseus. Never before were such magnificent special effects employed in the service of a script so pedestrian and banal.

Until now.

That's right. In case you've somehow missed it, the kajillion-dollar, major studio, star-studded—and I do mean star-studded—remake of Clash of the Titans premieres in one month. And I hate to admit it, but based on what I've seen so far, The Kid and I are probably going to be sitting in the theater on opening weekend, wearing our silly 3D glasses and enjoying every overdone, overwrought, over-loud second of it.

But as we do so, I might also find myself feeling just a slight twinge of some sort, in part for what the script does to the story of Perseus, but mostly for Mr. Harryhausen, as I'll be wondering: was this remake really necessary?

Let the arguments begin.

---

ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.