IMMORTALS (2011)

Even taking into account the continued dominance of The Hunger Games in the public consciousness, some observers were suprised by the weak box-office showing of Wrath of the Titans, the sequel to the 2010 version of Clash of the Titans, during its opening weekend. Perhaps people were under the impression that they'd already seen the sequel to the Clash remake last fall when Tarsem Singh's fantasia hit theaters. Between the impression made by the 2010 Clash, best remembered for "Release the Kraken!" and the likely response to the pseudo sequel that was Immortals -- it even had Titans in it! -- I can understand why few people would want to see another sequel.

Over the course of an epic bender, King Hyperion of the Herculoids, or was it Heracleans (Mickey Rourke) has managed to conquer much of the known world, putting the "Hellenics" to flight or to the sword. Apparently this all started because he wanted a bow -- the Epirus Bow, a bitchin' weapon from the long-ago war of immortals. Legend says that the victors of that war dubbed themselves "gods," while labelling the losers "titans," as if "titan" was some sort of insult. From that account, you'd think there was no real difference between the two except that one side won and the other lost. In fact, the gods are buff, rangy he-men led by Zeus (Luke Evans), with their own Warrior Smurfette in the form of Athena (Isabel Lucas), while the titans are sort of like elves with a rage virus. Zeus put them in a cage inside Mt. Tartarus, but because the Epirus Bow is such an awesome weapon Hyperion is sure that it would free them, presuming that the bow fires arrows of some sort. It could only go great with his terrifying Fanged Rabbit helmet. Only he doesn't know where it is. Maybe a Virgin Oracle would know, but they tend to stick together and talk in their own special language and kill a fool who lays hands on them. Being a wise king, Hyperion has others lay hands on them. Those who survive end up only with the three amigas of the real A-No. 1 Virgin Oracle, Phaedra (Frieda Pinto), who escapes to look for a hero. Hyperion eventually shoves the women into a bull-shaped oven, possibly planning to snack on them later.

Phaedra sort of knows who she's looking for. Theseus (Henry Cavill) is a bastard and a child of rape, a tall, strapping, barefoot peasant who drew a high number in the refugee lottery for his village now that Hyperion's army is closing in. That means he gets to see Hyperion sack the town and cut his poor mom's throat in a fit of pique. "Witness hell," the king mutters.  Before long, Hyperion, Phaedra and the obligatory irreverent rogue (Stephen Dorff) are free and on the run, with the gods rooting them on. That's all they can do with Zeus pulling some prime-directive crap on them. He got to hang out with Theseus disguised as John Hurt for who knows how long, but the boy now needs to prove himself so no god better help him out. See, this isn't a ripoff of Clash of the Titans at all! In that movie, Zeus wants to help Perseus but the sullen lout won't let him. Here, the gods want to help -- heck, I imagine each one of them would like to smite Hyperion so he doesn't -- how shall I put this? -- unleash their (im)mortal enemies -- but Zeus himself won't let them. See? It's different! How different? Maybe Poseidon can get away with killing a bunch of Herculoids with a cannonball dive from the clouds into the oily sea, and maybe Zeus can't say no to his little girl Athena, but when one of the other gods lends a hand to our hero, Zeus puts him through a wall and the sucker is f'n dead! If that's how he runs things, bring on the Titans. And Hyperion, thinking "No fair!" despite Zeus's best efforts, intends to speed that day.

In the course of his adventures Theseus fights "The Beast," a big dude with a bull mask. This had to happen, so I'm told, because some dudes 3,000 years ago or so said that Theseus fought a guy with a bull head. Theseus supposedly did some other stuff like found the city of Athens, but the filmmakers could only verify the fight with the "Minotaur" and so felt obliged to include a version of it in their story. Anyway, Theseus finds the Epirus Bown embedded in a big rock, but then he loses it to the Herculoids. How awesome is this weapon? It does plus-all-the-dice-in-your-house damage to anything its self-generating light arrows touch, especially city walls. Our hero magnificently fails to prevent Hyperion from freeing the Titans, at which point Zeus summons the gang to layeth the smacketh down on those skittering, swarmimg, adorably mindless immortals. Theseus's revenge bout with Hyperion is but a sideshow to the war of the gods for which this film was once going to be named. For someone who on appearances hasn't slept in weeks, Hyperion is pretty good with his hands and has the edge on our hero until Theseus makes what those in the professional wrestling business call the "Superman comeback." But with Zeus about to bring a mountain down on the Titans, which begs the question why he didn't do that in the first place, will Theseus get a chance to fulfill his destiny? Given the global success of the film, we may yet find out.

The Clash of the Titans remake was a wretched affair, but Immortals makes it look like the Iliad. The problem this time isn't the utter unpleasantness of the hero -- Cavill is reasonably earnest and plausible in his role -- but the garish idiocy of the entire project. It was put in the hands of a director with a "visionary" reputation who here seems incapable of directing actors or action. The tableau is his favorite mode of presentation, adding to the overall atmosphere of suffocating fakeness. The picture may have gone over big in theatrical 3-D, but rarely has an aspiring epic seemed so lacking in essential dimensions. It reminded me of the collages of magazine clippings that might decorate the walls of a high-school art class. Immortals is one of the ugliest films I've seen in a long time, and it gets extra ugly points for thinking it's pretty. And yet it almost certainly wasn't the worst film of 2011 - not with such stuff as Green Lantern and Red Riding Hood in the running. And if its existence has actually contributed to strangling the Titans series in its cradle, I suppose it deserves at least one compliment.

MEDEA (1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini probably doesn't get enough credit for changing the face of movies. By applying neorealist principles to historical drama, he pioneered a grungy, naturalistic vision of the past that belied the romanticized, aestheticized look of the generic period epic. His Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) set a pictorial tone that reappeared in films as diverse as The Lion in Winter, Jabberwocky and (perhaps most apropos) The Last Temptation of Christ. At the same time, Pasolini's objective was not strict historical realism. St. Matthew includes American spirituals on its soundtrack, which as a whole is an expressionist collage of music chosen for effect rather than conventional thematic fitness. In that respect he's a peer of Stanley Kubrick, and there's a certain similarity in dispassionate tone to Kubrick in this adaptation of the Euripedes tragedy and the core myth. Pasolini would go beyond Kubrick in taking that clinical approach to atrocity, culminating in his Sadean swansong Salo. Medea is a milestone in Pasolini's development; a high-culture event that gives the St. Matthew treatment to Greek mythology and takes it to a new expressionist level of cacophonous multicultural violence. It combines the movie debut of Maria Callas, the most famous opera diva of her time -- she was known to multitudes as the object of gossip, Aristotle Onassis having dumped her for Jackie Kennedy, while aficionados lauded her singing and acting -- and some extreme gore for late Sixties cinema. It isn't the Greece most movie fans thought they knew -- it's worlds away from Jason and the Argonauts -- but it's arguably a more convincing evocation of an ancient and therefore alien world.

Pasolini starts with Jason  and the revelation from his centaur mentor Chiron (Laurent Terzieff) of his royal heritage and destiny. As Jason matures, Chiron transforms from centaur to human and informs the youth that the gods don't really exist. Still, Jason (Giuseppe Gentile) must undertake his legendary mission to take the Golden Fleece from Colchis, a land more savage than his own. This is illustrated with a fertility ritual involving human sacrifice. The victim is butchered -- we see the head separated from the trunk and the scattered limbs, and the blood is shared out among the people, who use it to anoint their crops. Medea (Callas) is a priestess here, and there's a sense that the people aren't grateful for the priesthood's bloody work. She and her brother are spit on, and the brother is beaten, so it probably isn't a surprise that she falls for Jason, helps him take the Fleece, and flees with him.

The rest of the film is what Zeus has in mind in the Harryhausen Jason when he mentions that there's more in store for the hero and his lover. They have two children, but Jason grows tired of Medea, and a vision of Chiron in both centaur and human form suggests that he can set aside the barbarian woman in favor of a civilized princess. Medea, however, is the proverbial scorned woman of unsurpassed fury. She goes all Fatal Attraction on Jason, first murdering his new bride, --we see her mental rehearsal of a fiery death for the girl, then the less spectacular reality -- and driving his new father-in-law to suicide. Then she takes their kids, kills them, and turns her home into a pyre for them and herself, though not before giving Jason the tongue-lashing he deserves at a bare minimum.

As I've hinted, there's little in the way of white marble and peplums here. Pasolini accentuates the exotic if not the atavistic side of "Classical" culture, loading the soundtrack with what we call "world music" now, ranging from African sounds to the "Bulgarian voices" that were in vogue about twenty years ago to what sounds to me much like Japanese string and vocal music. Everything seems intended to overthrow our assumption that Greece must embody refined civilization. Nevertheless, there's an epic sweep to Pasolini's landscapes and an epic sense of architecture seen from the maximum distance that still allows you to see people leaping to their deaths. The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri in spite of the director's resistance to glamor.

But glamor is irresistible because the film's a vehicle for Callas, who had been so acclaimed as an operatic actress that spoken-word success seems assured. Yet Pasolini uses her more as an icon, both because her Greco-American features look right for the role and because she seemed like someone who could have or should have become a real-life Medea. This isn't really an actors' movie, and while Callas isn't bad, it's not proof on its own that she would have been a successful film actress. It's a director's film above all, unmistakably a Pasolini, and despite some stiff bits and some pretentiousness about the centaur, it's worth trying as a all-around sensory experience even if you've never heard of Callas and her tragedies.

On the Big Screen: THOR (2011)

Stan Lee and his acolytes are fond of describing the dialogue he wrote for the denizens of Asgard in Marvel comics as "Shakespearean," though that's really sort of an insult to the Bard. Maybe that's why someone thought that Kenneth Branagh would make a good director for the latest episode in the long build-up to Joss Whedon's The Avengers. But here's another theory: maybe the producers thought Branagh would emphasize with the film's protagonist, a golden boy fallen from grace. Twenty years ago or so, Branagh seemed a young god of cinema. Henry V staked his claim to be the next Olivier, and he even came with an appropriate consort in Emma Thompson. Henry was a fine film, in some respects superior to Olivier's film, and Branagh followed it with a high-concept thrill-ride, Dead Again, that pointed toward pop success to match his works of art. Two films later came a double disaster: the unmodulated hysteria and dismal miscasting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the end of his marriage. While Thompson moved on to surpass Branagh, earning Oscars as both actress and writer, he staked his future on an all-star complete-text Hamlet that proved only that William Shakespeare himself probably never staged his full text if he had any sense. Given that Branagh had previously and judiciously cut down Henry and Much Ado About Nothing, his "playwright's cut" stank of gimmickry as well as cronyism. It suffered by comparison to Franco Zefferelli's version of just a few years before (which also handicapped Branagh by pre-emptively casting some of his cronies). Meanwhile, his credibility as a master thespian, already shaky due to his failure to ever come up with a proper American accent, suffered further from association with another disaster, Wild Wild West. Chewed up and spat out by the arch-homewrecker of our time, Helena Bonham Carter, Branagh had fallen to the level of a mid-range character actor by the time Marvel and Paramount promised directorial redemption with the tale of a youth born to godhead who must learn to be worthy of his station.

Branagh has exploited the opportunity by making a mostly efficient, mildly entertaining and utterly impersonal film. Cut off from his cronies except for his musical alter ego Patrick Doyle -- who contributes a mostly efficient, mildly entertaining and utterly impersonal score -- Branagh had one task above all others. He had to put over Chris Hemsworth as a hero people would want to see again and a personality people would believe could hold his own with the overwhelming star power of Robert Downey Jr. in the Avengers movie. In that task, I think he and Hemsworth succeeded. If the actor came across as a mere muscleman, both Thor and Avengers were probably doomed. But actor and director, working with five writers, made the title character a likable egotist with a sense of humor, a god who does dumb things but doesn't come across as stupid, who is humbled and redeemed but can by expected to retain enough arrogance not to be blown off the screen by Downey or Mark Ruffalo or Jeremy Renner (who makes his unbilled Marvel debut here) or Chris Evans when the time comes. Following current comics, this Thor doesn't actually talk "Shakespearean." That is, there are no thees and thous or archaic verb conjugations. Instead, he comes across as a mostly good-natured, articulate barbarian, the sort of fellow who expresses his appreciation of a cup of coffee (his first ever) by dashing the cup on a diner floor and demanding "Another!" The scene in which he tries to explain to a gently exasperated Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) that he meant no disrespect to the diner is one of the film's more charming moments, and there are more of those throughout the picture than I originally expected. It seems to be a tendency of Marvel movies (though the upcoming Captain America movie is likely to break it) to make their heroes slightly boorish and abrasive -- just enough to humanize them and stay true to the "superheroes with problems" archetype that defined Marvel back in the 1960s and differentiated them decisively from their DC Comics rivals. The Marvel heroes seem to need to learn many times over that great responsibility comes with great power, but it's a lesson that probably can't be taught often enough for some audiences.

Thor is a star vehicle for an actor who is not yet a star. In Hemsworth's orbit, Academy Award Winner Natalie Portman gives a likable yet nondescript performance that probably any two dozen actresses of her age and stature could have given just as well. It was clever of the writers to give her a pretty female sidekick (along with token actual Norseman Stellan Skarsgard) as comedy relief to make Portman more credible as a hardcore scientist -- still not very credible but at least more so. As for Academy Award Winner Anthony Hopkins, I sighed when I read that he'd been cast as Odin. It was the thoughtlessly obvious choice and I expected him to phone it in -- loudly, of course. But the fact is, Odin Allfather is probably the ideal role for Hopkins at this stage of his career. Odin does little but bluster and rage in the comics, and Hopkins can certainly bluster and rage. The meeting of Hopkins and Branagh, once possibly highly anticipated and later probably highly dreaded, is disappointing only because Odin comes across as weak due to the script's emphasis on his role as a peacemaker and its emphasis on the usual Fathers & Sons archetypes. Likewise, Tom Hiddleston's Loki is perhaps too subtle and nuanced a villain for the film's good. The mischievous god is just learning about his origins in this story, and the revelations render him conflicted rather than utterly evil. Hiddleston performs the role well but the vagueness of Loki's ultimate agenda makes him an uncertain foundation on which to build the Avengers edifice. Noteworthy among the rest of the cast is Branagh's characteristically inclusive casting of Idris Elba as the Norse god Heimdall and the wasteful casting of Tadanobu Asano (Genghis Khan himself) as Hogun the Grim of the Warriors Three. This mighty man of Asian cinema gets maybe a half-dozen lines of dialogue and doesn't even get to wear Hogun's cool Mongolian cap from the comics.

I just called Thor an impersonal piece of direction, but doing that begs the question of whether Branagh has ever had a personal style. He's always been fond of the moving camera, whether he was tracking himself lugging little Christian Bale across the battered landscape of Henry V or restlessly circling around his actors whenever an opportunity arose. You get the circling about here and you get plenty of the uniformed spectacle that is arguably also a Branagh trait. But it's not as if no other director has these tics. As an FX wrangler and director of action he's a mixed bag on Thor. Much of the fighting is filmed too close to be coherent, though the battle with the Destroyer in New Mexico is done well enough. Sometimes Branagh gets the action and pacing just right, as when a powerless but still formidable Thor invades the SHIELD cordon around the impact point of Mjolnir, beating up guards through a labyrinth of fencing while Renner's "Agent Barton" draws a bead on him from above, only to face a terrible surprise when reunited with his hammer. Sometimes, like during a flashback battle between Aesir and Jotuns, he reduces the screen to a jumble of vaguely violent stuff. I'm not sure whether it makes a difference that I saw the film flat; 3D might actually make some parts of the action more confusing. Would Bo Welch's production designs of Asgard and Jotunheim look less ugly or tacky in 3D? I leave it to those who saw it that way to say. Fortunately, the story has momentum enough to let you overlook the film's visual flaws.

Speaking of momentum, Thor should restore any that the Avengers project had lost following the tepid critical reception for Iron Man 2. My guess is that people will be willing to see Hemsworth reprise the role, and I'm interested in seeing him interact with Downey and the other high-powered stars next year. Thor also has to be considered some kind of personal triumph, if not career redemption, for Kenneth Branagh. It means he'll probably have some future behind the camera. He can at least advertise his next project as coming from "The Director of Thor," and if he behaves himself, he might be hired to make a Bond film someday.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

Overshadowed by a higher-profile project, a quasi-remake of The Bad Lieutenant, this is Werner Herzog's other American film of 2009, and a David Lynch production at that. It pretty much delivers on whatever expectations might come with that combination. It's "inspired by a true story," and in an interview included on the DVD Herzog expands on the meaning of that term. There is a true story of an acting student who played mythical matricide Orestes and then killed his own mother. Herzog and co-writer Herbert Golder, who initiated the project, used that incident and some of the personal details of the killer's life as a framework for their own speculations on the factors driving a man to murder. The killer is a free man today and Herzog met him; he relates feeling acute disquiet on discovering that the man had an Aguirre: The Wrath of God poster in his trailer-park home. That discovery may have inspired the director to film part of the new picture back on some old Aguirre locations in Peru, once he decided that Pakistan, where the real killer had a deformative experience, was just slightly too dangerous for location shooting. As if to compensate for that compromise, Herzog, along with star Michael Shannon and producer Eric Bassett, decided to do some clandestine filming in the volatile Uighur region of China. That footage also serves, arguably, as an intrusion of the real killer's madness on the fictional madness of Brad McCullum, Shannon's character. It's unclear whether the fictional character is ever supposed to have been in a Muslim country, though he tells his doomed kayaking buddies in Peru that he intends to become a Muslim as a way to stunt his internal development. The Uighur footage could easily represent the killer's pilgrimage to an Islam of his own imagination, though his practice seems to extend only to occasionally calling himself "Farouk." Otherwise, he has a fraught relationship with God, whose face he sees on a Puritan Oatmeal can and whose voice he hears on a recording of "I Was Born to Preach the Gospel And I Sure Do Love My Job."

"Some people act a role; I play a part." Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) muses on matricide on stage (above) and at his flamingo-cluttered home.

The film's tag is "The Mystery Isn't Who, But Why," but don't let that leave you thinking the mystery gets solved. Instead, Herzog's point seems to be the irreducibility of a madman's mind to one decisive influence, a key to all the mysteries in his head. There's no Rosebud to help us here. We can see an apparently obvious influence of the Orestes myth, which is instantly complicated by Brad's girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny) taking the role of Clytemnestra, Orestes's mother. But Orestes isn't quite a perfect fit. Brad insists on wearing an inappropriate poncho-like garment he picked up in Peru that actually makes him look more Biblical than Greek. Considering his role in a fatherless household and his problematic relationship with God, Brad could be a Jesus figure in some neglected nook of his noodle. That possibility emerges most alarmingly when he invades a naval hospital, desiring to visit "the sick in general." On the other hand, he may also see himself as a baby ostrich like the birds his homophobic uncle (Brad Dourif) raises. Flightless or ungainly birds are the dominant animal motif of the picture, as both Brad and his suffocating mother (Grace Zabriskie) are obsessed with flamingos. Something can be read into everything shown here, but too much shouldn't be read into anything. Everything's a factor for such a vulnerable mind, but such a mind isn't the sort of puzzle where all the pieces fit.

My Son, My Son, is the pilgrimage of a wandering mind to Peru, China and points unknown.

Without a single Rosebud and the closure such a key would promise, My Son could well be a frustrating experience for many viewers. The police procedural framework, with Willem Dafoe as the straight man in charge of negotiations, creates dramatic expectations that the eventual anticlimax probably deliberately disappoints. Almost by nature, given the collaborators, the film is digressive and gratuitous, and some of Herzog's gimmicks, like making characters stand still instead of freeze-framing to represent time standing still for Brad, simply don't work. The coda, in which a small boy discovers some of Brad's legacy, clarifies matters not a bit, nor is it meant to. The best I can suggest is that the peculiar discovery begs interpretation by the boy himself, and could mark the beginning of an accumulation of mental associations that might leave the boy as mad as Brad someday. Or it could mean no such thing. This is a movie that insists on each viewer drawing his own conclusions. That may be unsatisfactory, but I was stimulated by the challenge, at least, and I found Herzog's imagined reconstruction of the clutter of a deranged mind somewhat convincing.

* * *

An interesting accompaniment to Herzog's study of symbolism and psychosis on the First Look DVD is Ramin Bahrani's short exercise in anthropomorphism, Plastic Bag, for which Herzog voices the title character. Strange as it may sound, this narrative of the endless life and adventures of a creature separated from and searching for its "Maker" would make an even better companion piece for Toy Story 3. As Herzog drones on teutonically bemoaning his plight (had he directed this himself, only Kinski could have done the voice), Bahrani dares you to disbelieve, but his epic visuals tell a different, eloquently more plausible story. The one-two punch of Plastic Bag and My Son, My Son makes this DVD, at the very least, one of the most interesting things you could watch this year.

In Brief: PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF (2010)

It's a Chris Columbus film, so it can't really aspire to be more than competent. In many ways, this adaptation of a popular children's book series is an utterly generic special effects fantasy. It certainly wears the Harry Potter influence most obviously in the concept of a training camp for demigods, though we learn very little about its rules and rituals from this would-be tentpole of a would-be series. The hero, I understand, has been aged from his original form so he could be sold as a hottie, and he is played by a blandly handsome young man. He's seconded by a blandly handsome young woman and a blandly humorous young black man, the latter perhaps unfortunately cast as a satyr. They could all have been more forceful (especially since the girl is supposed to be a mighty warrior) and funnier. Percy's early exasperation at the outlandishness of his situation is quickly set aside, and the movie suffers for it. There's a mystery, but the solution leaves a "who cares?" aftertaste since the ill-concealed villain of the piece is as bland as the heroes and declares his motivations as if reading a press release. If he's the "big bad" of all the books then I doubt I'll miss much if there are no more movies in this series.

I've described a pretty mediocre movie, and that's what The Lightning Thief is, but I hasten to add that, as a doorway to Greek mythology and a hint of its wonders, Columbus's movie hits the Clash of the Titans remake with both a lightning bolt and a water tower and dunks it in the river. Percy Jackson still falls short of the ideal in some respects; like Clash, it shows us the Olympian pantheon but neglects to identify most of them, and there's clearly an urge to make poor Hades a Bad Guy in a way he really wasn't in his own time. But in happy contrast to the "divinity sucks" attitude of the 2010 Clash, Percy is unashamed of indulging in fantasies of power and the heroic things that can be done with it. It may not be profound to observe that being a demigod could be cool, but if you're making a film with one as your hero you could draw worse conclusions, as has been proven this very year. I'll concede that Clash has the better action scenes, but without the right spirit encompassing them they aren't enough for me to recommend that miserable film. Whatever Lightning Thief lacks, it has the right spirit for the sort of story it wants to tell. I can state one thing for certain: this is not the worst film of 2010.

In Brief: CLASH OF THE TITANS (2010)

"The ancient gods were petty and cruel and plagued mankind with suffering." So went the legend of the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys TV series, which probably passes for an ancient source for Louis Leterrier and the authors of his latest film. Their most ancient source, in all likelihood, was the Ray Harryhausen production they were assigned to remake. That 1981 picture provided the present filmmakers with a laundry list of characters and creatures who needed to appear in their screenplay: Perseus, Andromeda, Zeus; a Medusa, a Kraken. It also seems to have served as a "how not to" for the remake team, particularly when it came to costuming the characters. The important characters -- Perseus and the Olympian gods -- must not appear to be wearing "sheets" or "diapers," nor should Sam Worthington in the hero's part bear a hairstyle in any way resembling Harry Hamlin's much-deplored do. Perseus must impress the modern audience as a badass, so he has to have a buzzcut. The gods, meanwhile, must all wear gleaming suits of armor, the better to look like video game characters. The film as a whole makes a mixed impression visually. Much of the art direction -- the interiors of palaces; the streets of Argos -- is quite attractive, while the character designs are pretty hideous.

Worse than the cosmetic alterations to the Clash story -- itself something of a travesty of myth -- is the new film's attitude. Has a mythic adventure film ever been this grim or glum? The new Clash is the work of people who had no business making a movie based on Greek mythology. I appreciate that the basically fictional nature of myth leaves writers free to interpret the material by their own lights, but you would think that an adapter of myths might convey to audiences an appreciation of those qualities that have kept these particular myths in our consciousness long after we stopped worshipping the gods of Olympus. Instead, the writers have rendered the realm of myth a miserable place where the reign of gods is an intolerable tyranny, and humans actually wage war on gods by destroying their statues and denying them the worship which, according to this film's unoriginal premise, the Olympians depend on for their power, if not their lives. The writers seem to have a beef with religion itself that they take out on a dead religion in a fantasy film in which gods are real. That annoys me. I'm an atheist who enjoys Jesus and Bible movies, and I explain this arguable eccentricity by saying that I see The Greatest Story Ever Told as no more a call to prayer than I do a film about Hercules. They are equally fantastic as far as I'm concerned. But in the 2010 Clash we have a movie that treats the Olympians' expectation of worship as if the Inquisition was outside the writers' own doors. It's a fantasy film with little sense of fantasy or of wonder, and it doesn't have the courage of its own convictions. Sam Worthington's dull Perseus insists stubbornly on saving Argos as a man, not a god, but defeats the Kraken (a giant mouth with tentacles) by displaying the Medusa's head to it while riding a magical flying horse, after accepting "black magic" healing for a giant scorpion bite. Zeus himself (poor Liam Neeson) notes the inconsistency, but this "not as a god" business seems to mostly be a matter of not putting on airs and not enjoying one's work. The 2010 model Perseus is a hero for his time, perhaps, -- ours, that is, -- in his sullen nurturing of grievance and his apparent preference to be left alone over being a hero-king. There is the stink of Gladiator on him.

To be fair, Leterrier's Clash has some nicely done action sequences, and I wonder whether people who don't share my attitude toward mythology would simply enjoy the remake. I can't help but think that Worthington's anticharismatic star turn would turn anyone off, and as it turned out, the film was no blockbuster. When it attempted originality, it dropped some lovely bombs of bad dialogue, my favorite being Io's request that an impassioned Perseus "calm your storm." In its terse badness, that rivals my favorite bad dialogue of the last decade: William Hurt's "Do not fret" in The Village. More original still is the Djinn, a hulking desert creature out of a video game (or destined for one) who offers Perseus his guttural grunting assistance until the climactic moment when he can strike a tide-turning blow against the Medusa by --- blowing himself up! The mind reels....

The entire project was driven by a notion that the Harryhausen film had grown so popular since its relatively underwhelming original release that a remake would be pre-sold, but that it had to be retold in the language of 21st century cool and purged of any hint of "corn" or "cheese." The test of its success will be simple: will anyone remember it thirty years from now? Let the Gods decide....

IPHIGENIA (1977)

Americans, how would you feel if the lion's share of westerns were spaghetti westerns, if your national mythology had been appropriated by another country's movie industry? I imagine the people of Greece must feel that way when they see their ancient mythology presented to the world in the form of Italian muscleman films? The overwhelming majority of films based on Greek mythology are not Greek, but Michael Cacoyannis's stark epic comes straight from the source. It's adapted from the play Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, one of the great ancient tragedians, but it also had to have struck a contemporary chord for modern Greek audiences.

Kostas Kazakos as Agamemnon

Mythology tells us that King Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek expeditionary force to rescue his sister-in-law Helen from Troy, was ordered by an oracle to sacrifice his eldest daughter to the goddess Artemis, who would then allow the winds to blow the Greek fleet from its base at Aulis to the enemy coast. This is just another feather in the cap of the House of Atreus, and Agamemnon will get his when he returns from the war (contra Troy, and fie on that awful film while I'm on the subject) and his grudge-holding wife Clytemnestra kills him, only to be whacked in turn by her son Orestes at the instigation of his sister Elektra, in whom Freud took an interest millennia later. Elaborations of the basic myth explain that Agamemnon lured his daughter to Aulis with a promise of marriage to Achilles, then thought better of the whole deal and sent a messenger to tell his wife to turn back for home, only to have that message intercepted by minions of his brother Menelaus, Helen's husband, who wants nothing getting in the way of his revenge mission. None the wiser, Clytemnestra's party ends up in Achilles's camp, only to be baffled by the hero's bafflement at all talk of marriage. When the truth comes out Clytemnestra is furious and Achilles is characteristically more so at being made a dupe. He's now willing to fight against all odds to save Iphigenia from the sacrifice, but seeing that the odds are pretty hopeless, the girl decides to go to her fate rather than let people waste their lives for her sake.

Panos Mihalopoulos as Achilles and Irene Papas as Clytemnestra

That's the story Cacoyannis tells, but he gives it a strongly political emphasis. The film represented the director's return to Greece after years of self-imposed exile during the reign of a military junta, and a deep suspicion of militarism pervades his interpretation of the myth. In his Iphigenia the super-army created by Agamemnon has become a thing unto itself, defiant toward leaders who in the absence of combat look more like politicians than warriors or heroes. They are manipulated by Odysseus, the nearest thing to an outright villain in the picture, who is portrayed as a self-interested demagogue possibly out to usurp Agamemnon's elected position as commander-in-chief. He goads the rank-and-file into demanding the sacrifice originally ordained by the oracle by telling them it's only fair when so many mother's sons are going to lose their lives in the war that the first casualty be one of the commander's children. Agamemnon himself craves his position of command, and his second thoughts about sacrificing his daughter are tempered by the idea that saving her might break up the army or endanger his position on top. He takes out his guilt feelings on his brother Menelaus, blaming him and his "whore" Helen for having to kill his own daughter. But Menelaus reminds him that he, Agamemnon, was the one who wanted control of the army, an end towards which Menelaus made himself subservient, even though it was his honor at stake in the matter of Helen. Initially repelled by the thought of sacrifice himself, Menelaus ends up adding to the pressure on his brother. Even Achilles, the loyalty of whose Myrmidons was legendary, finds himself unable to win his own men over to the defense of Iphigenia. "We came for a war, not a wedding feast," they tell him before driving the invincible warrior out of camp with a hail of rocks. With the gods significantly if not necessarily implicitly absent from the story, it ends up being the army, above all, that demands the death of an innocent who is imperiled only by her proximity to power. The heroic generals of myth, who might well serve as symbols for the junta themselves, end up being sacrifices of a kind to a machine of their creation.

The irony amid the proofs of the powerlessness of heroes in the face of the war machine is Iphigenia's own determination to make a genuine, honest sacrifice, not for the sake of the war but for the sake of her "new friend" Achilles and the others who were willing to protect her from the military mob. Resolved that no one should die for her sake, her only choice left is to die, but to make it clear that she dies by her own choice and on her own terms. But before her courage creates the illusion of a happy ending, we have a cruel finale in which the long-desired winds finally rise before Iphigenia is killed, as Odysseus seemed worriedly to realize they would, inspiring Agamemnon to make one final lunge to save his daughter -- in vain. Now that's tragedy.

Tatiana Papamoschou as Iphigenia

What Cacoyannis lacked in the way of vast Hollywood-style sets he makes up for in manpower and a vast landscape to deploy his actors on. Whatever the Greek film cost, it achieved an epic look without looking overproduced. The stark production design, including the masks the generals wear on public occasions, gives Ancient Greece a more alien quality than Hollywood or Italy ever conveyed, compelling us to look at the old story with fresh eyes.

Landscapes and costume design more than make up for the lack of
conventionally classical sets in Cacoyannis's Iphigenia.

The cast probably won't be familiar to most viewers, except for Irene Papas, but they form a strong ensemble, including an uncanny Tatiana Papamoschou in the title role. Whatever damage generations of sword-and-sandal films may have done to the credibility of Greek mythology, Cacoyannis's Iphigenia is an honorable continuation of the ancient tradition.