Did you miss our list of the movie goofs IMDb users found most interesting in the past year? Read it now, and see our latest lists and more in IMDb Picks.
Join us for a live Facebook Q&A with Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier on Thursday, April 6, beginning at 4:15 p.m. ET/1:15 p.m. PT. Make sure to follow IMDb on Facebook and send your questions now to #IMDbAskJeremy.
Related lists from IMDb users
Title: Clash of the Titans (1981)
Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.
| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Laurence Olivier | ... | ||
| Claire Bloom | ... | ||
| Maggie Smith | ... | ||
| Ursula Andress | ... | ||
| Jack Gwillim | ... | ||
| Susan Fleetwood | ... | ||
| Pat Roach | ... | ||
| Harry Hamlin | ... | ||
| Judi Bowker | ... | ||
| Burgess Meredith | ... | ||
| Siân Phillips | ... | ||
| Flora Robson | ... | ||
 |
Anna Manahan | ... | |
|
|
Freda Jackson | ... | |
| Tim Pigott-Smith | ... | ||
Perseus is the favored son of the god Zeus, but he has unwittingly ticked off the sea goddess Thetis. Just to make things worse, Perseus falls in love with the lovely Princess Andromeda, who used to be engaged to Thetis's son. Soon Perseus is off on one quest after another, with Zeus helping, Thetis hindering, and lots of innocent bystanders getting stabbed, drowned, and squished. Written by Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com}
This movie has been a favorite of mine since i was a kid--i was very into Greek mythology during grade school, so i loved this film, even though i've seen it about two dozen times (it continues to be a Sunday-afternoon staple on TV). There are a number of mythological inaccuracies in this film (the Kraken wasn't a mythological monster; Perseus didn't have Pegasus, but actually borrowed Hermes' winged sandals, etc.), but it's still a good kids' introduction to ancient mythology. While the actors playing the "mortals" are definitely inferior to those playing the Gods, i suppose it works in the sense of their being the Olympians' puppets and, well, a little limpness in the thespian department is somewhat de rigeur (as is the wise/comic sidekick of Burgess Meredith and the 'little and cute' factor of the mechanical owl) for the kind of classic matinee swashbuckler that "Clash of the Titans" is.
But all these complaints that the Harryhausen effects are crap and it would be so much better done with CGI... well, that's pure craziness. Sure, the monsters don't look convincing, but they look a hell of a lot more convincing then they would as cheap computer animation--can you honestly imagine the Medusa sequence being done any better with some cartoon computer program? (Why? So it could look like the crap in "Phantom Menace"?) I've always felt that Harryhausen's stop-motion technique and the resultant odd way in which the monsters moved added to the sense of their mythic status, their unreality, the sense that these are creatures from another world, another plane. (The recent Asian fantasy/action film "Onmyoji" paid tribute to the master by having a CGI demon army move in Harryhausen stop-motion style and damn me if they didn't look scarier, more unearthly for it.) In my opinion, CGI looks even less "real," more like a painted-on cartoon. There's a depth and detail to creatures that have actually been created in the three-dimensional real world that those who have only existed on a computer screen don't have. Also, no matter how good an actor is, there's a difference between someone who's in the same room with the monster he's fighting, or who at least knows what it looks like, and someone who's just trying to "act scared" in the general direction where something will be inserted later. (Imagine the "Alien" movies made with a hyped-up animated creature: you know that even motionless and plastic squeezed between light stands, that giant H.R. Geiger monster gave everyone on set the creeps.) Maybe people like CGI because they feel safer with obviously fake monsters, things that never even existed as a three-foot high model next to the ham sandwich in someone's shop.