Reviews

Yesterday I watched Clash of the Titans at a local theatre and I have to be sincere, the direction of the movie was so bad that I was speechless for a few minutes for all the wrong reasons. I'm still trying to understand how someone could leave such a rich tale so undeveloped on every front with 106 mins of running time at his disposal.

It's one of those movies which offer you over 1.5 hours of nothingness. The introduction is insanely rushed as you see the main character go through different stages in his life within 3-4 minutes giving you just enough of each for the director to squeeze in a couple of supposedly memorable quotes regarding the character's destiny (which you forget in about a minute).

Now I have to mention this because my friends seemed to notice this issue too: Worthington stood out like a sore thumb in this movie. He just looked too modern. We agreed that it was due to his look being too 'clean'. His head is shaved (the same exact look he's had in both Terminator Salvation and Avatar, which is just lazy) and his look never changes during his supposedly long (epic?) voyage. No scars, barely a hint of a beard after days of travelling and the occasional fight. I like the actor and I don't think he was miscast but he was not used well imo.

The characters in general were left TOTALLY undeveloped. People walked in, walked out and died throughout the story and you never care about any of them. Important characters go from looking invincible to dying all of a sudden. I'm serious. WHAM! They're dead. Some 'important' characters die so quickly that you're not even sure you understood how they were actually killed.

As I said before, this movie lacked all direction. Some supposedly comic situations begged to be re-shot. The delivery was terrible and the director simply seemed in a rush to wrap things up. Not even the accepted clichés worked well in this movie. One ends up looking at the people sitting next to him to see whether he was supposed to laugh or whether they were sharing his same agony as this mess unfolded. The cuts from one character to another also seemed very odd. You cut from a character,then to another and then back to the first one and each time the character is looking in a completely different direction! It was so surreal, like a low budget 70s movie.

Anyways, this movie has so many problems I can't relate all of them or this review would end up being more epic than the movie itself. I won't even go into how cheap and useless most of the dialogue was or the shocking LACK of action meaning that the first battle, which is supposed to be against minor enemies, ends up being the most noteworthy 'CLASH' in the whole movie!

Bottom line: this movie was a complete mess. The direction was terrible and the story was incredibly boring, leaving some moviegoers asleep as the end credits rolled.

After reading some of the comments and reviews on Spiderman 3 I was a bit shaky about watching this film at the theatres. But is it as disjointed as some say, a big-budget nothing as others did, or indeed too much romance and little time for anything else? Well, let me start with confirming that the film does feel rather disjointed. The conception and execution of the plans/plots of some of the characters seem to happen too quickly at times, at times without the usual intermittent change of scene; *wham* *boom* character flips from good to bad and vice-versa, now trying to destroy NY, the other trying to save it from oblivion etc... Regardless, it doesn't manage to ruin the film so I'd prefer to wait until the DVD version comes out to see if deleted scenes are re-integrated into the movie before the axe is dropped on its score.

It's quite clear that the Mary Jane issue is starting to consume too much time in the movies. Since the first film, the relationship between Peter Parker and Mary Jane has absorbed more and more time. Not only does she appear in over half of the last film but, as in Spiderman 1 AND 2, she is yet again taken hostage by the villain(s) in the final battle, offering us the usual 10 mins of helpless obstacle dodging, not only by Spiderman... but herself. Leave the poor girl alone for goodness' sake! Hopefully, the demise of Harry Osborn should make their relationship just a bit less complicated and less focused on. So, I don't agree that the 90% of the film feels like a Dawson's Creek re-run as said in one of the previous comments, though in one of the scenes (the one on the bridge where Harry's 'dark' plot starts to unfold) that aforementioned comment did echo in my ears for a bit, but it doesn't last too long, thank goodness...

I also don't agree with people who said that there were too many villains and that they were not given enough space and depth. At the end of the film it's clear that both Sandman and Venom will appear again if the saga continues, especially the latter one of course, so one should be safe in the knowledge that more will come out in the future. As mentioned above, there are indications that this film was transitory and that the end of certain long-standing issues could be followed by the appearance of new ones which could re-generate the series a bit. Having a character such as Harry so close to the superhero is a problem when making such a film as neither Peter nor Spiderman can ignore him, therefore their feud always demanded its fair share of space in all of the films, but now that it's settled (hopefully) the story can move on and open up a bit to new plots and characters and maybe a proper re-visiting of familiar, yet underplayed, ones.

To conclude, this film will not be universally loved or hated by Spidey fans. You'll just have to go and see it for yourself. Though scenes like the (looong) one where Peter shows off in front of all of New York just to show us how 'bad' he's become simply because he changed his hairstyle, wears darker clothes and is more open with the ladies make the movie stutter in places, but it's still a solid film which is worth watching.

So what are you waiting for? 7/10