elanya

I'm not going to do a plot summary, as I'm sure you can find one online, and this is going to be long enough as it is. Same with the myths. Feel free to discuss, though :)

There are a number of things I want to hold this movie to task for. I'll even be generous and leave out a direct comparison with the original. I want to make some references, at least, to the original myth and Greek Myth in general though. I'll subsume that uder 'story'. I'm also going to look at some things that made both my inner feminist and my inner anthropologist pretty cranky. But I'll start with story.

So, since this will be a shorter list, I'm going to review the elements that they did include from the orignial myth.
-Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae
-Danae and Perseus get sent to sea in a brass coffin and are found by a fisherman
-Fisherman helps raise Perseus
-Perseus kills Medusa, looking at her through a reflective shield
-Perseus gets Pegasus
-Cassiopia gets turned into an old woman for saying that her daughter is prettier than....someone.
-Andromeda is offered as a sacrifice to a sea monster to appease....a god
-Perseus saves her

So, that's not too bad, all things considered, I suppose. But there are some things in the way the story is framed that really irked me. So, lets get on to them!

-Zeus is good, Hades is evil.

This always annoys me - the idea that Hades is evil, and that he can be equated in some way with the Christian devil - that he is a horrible lord of Hell. Hades wasn't any better or worse than the rest of the Greek gods, really. The underword was a lucrative spot to rule. He had a hot young wife, even! The idea that Zeus subsists on love and Hades is powered by fear is also irksome, again because it has nothing to do with the Greek system of belief. This isn't D&D. The gods don't get more power because they have more worshippers. The only love Zeus seems to need to keep him really happy is the sweet sweet loving he will coerce from the occasional nymph or maiden in various creative rapes.

-War against the Gods

How does this concept fit in to a concept of Greek mythology? Occasionally people would rail against specific Gods - Perseus does in fact thwart Poseidons revenge in the base myth. But the concept of rejecting the gods en mass is a little much. Perseus himself was actualy the son of Zeus...and a nymph, so not 'human' at all. Well, hey, maybe he just never knew - his mother was dead in this version. The concept bothers me, I think, because of the brazen hubris. I'm not particularly religious, but in a world where the gods are known to exist, you'd think people would have a little more respect. We never get a clear idea of why they are rebelling - they blame the gods for not making their lives easy enough?

Everyone's story was recontextualized in this way, and specifically to victimize humans (especially women). I'll look at the ladies more but as for the men...

Perseus - family all killed by Hades
Perseus's dad -...killed by Hades
Acrisius/Calibos - wife seduced/raped by Zeus, hit with lightning bolt
Draco - lost someone (I forget who) in war versus Gods
Kephus - not clear why he wanted to war against the god, but boy did he ever! Theoretically had to chose between his daughter or his city but really we don't see much of him after that initial scene
Jinn (or djinn) - hate the gods, possibly cursed by them? This gives them the incentive to help Perseus despite the fact that they are otherwise enemies of humans/evil (see below for more on this :/)
I'm sure I'm missing some...


The Action

- Not worth it. There's some shots that looked like they'd been scammed directly from 300, but without the pretty. To be shallow - all those boys in skirts, and not a single upskirt shot to releave the tedium :V Thre were a coplue of good bits in each fight, but over all it did not get my adrenaline pumping.

There really wsn't all that much of it, anyway - training fight, scorpions, Medusa/Caliban, kracken. I think the training fight might have been the best of the lot. I kept expecting/hoping the scorpions would transform @_@

I could nitpick a few other things.... like the riduculous "calm your storm" line, when the audience was desperately expecting a note about him being turned to stone :V You can almost imagine Io thinking of it, and then rejecting the line. Almost. If only.

Moving on to other elements...

Ladies! Oh ladies, you sure do get boned.
Let's list the ladies, and examine their roles and what happens to them.

-Danae, Perseus's real mom.
She is dead at the beginning. We learn that after being raped/seduced by Zeus, her husband murdered her, to purge himself of *his* shame, or recover his honour or something. He was sorta smited by Zeus, and became Caliban with Hades's help later on. Notably, he gets a sort of vader-y moment of quasi redemption after Perseus kills him, because they both hate the gods, and it is all Zeus's fault, don't you know. ....Right. Sure sucks to be Danae, who totally gets shafted. All she does is sleep with a dude she thinks is her husband. That's worth murdering her for, right? In the orginal, she is Acricius's daughter, not his wife, and she gets locked in a tower, not murdered. (Also, Into: Golden Showers (receiving)).

-Perseus's adopted mom and sister
I think his mom has maybe one line? She and the sister are just there to get killed to create more pathos (well to try). In the original myth, it is Danae who hooks up with the fisherman, and she doesn't die so much as have to fend off annoying suitors after *he* kicks it. I don't know why they felt they needed this character - why his real mom (Danae) coudn't have survived, and then got offed. Maybe they figured she woudln't deign to be a fisherwoman (although canonically she did?) since she was a princess? It might have worked better, even as then she'd have been killed by Hades, and he later gives her husband (who killed her, or would have tried to kill her) power to try and kill Perseus... Anyway. These girls only exist to die. I shall name them... Fridge and Freezer!

-Cassiopia
...is purely there to mouth off and get turned old, and then never appears again. Both her husband and her daughter try to stop her, but no dice. Interestingly, even though she claims Andromeda is prettier than any of the goddesses, it is Hades who comes to punish her (partly an issue of plot timing, as the scene happens after Zeus gives Hades permission to fuck up human shit). Never seen again.

-Andromeda
She is just a macguffin, and not even a desirable one. Perseus really only seems to rescue her incidentally, initially. He kills the Kracken and smites Hades as revenge for his family. Later, when he saves her from drowning, she signifies the family that he couldn't save. She's a martyr with no personality. She's included because she is expected? Although honestly I also expected Athena, and she got cut... :p Perseus explicitly rejects her at the end, and tells her to go be a good queen. So I guess that is okay? Ish? She's not really a character though.

-Medusa
Was obvertly raped by a god 9unamed in the story, but canonically Poseidon) after taking shelter in a temple of Athena who, instead of helping, cursed her and turned her in to a Gorgon. As a gift, women weren't allowed to enter the temple, so whe wouldn't accidentlaly hurt them. So, she can only be killed by males, amd this is somehow a mercy? Hooray! In the original myth it isn't clear that she was raped vs was seduced vs was just kind of a ho, but it is Greek myth so that's entirely possible. I'm undecided on this one, honestly. At least she does get to fight back. Her story lets them lump Athena, who is supposed to be on Perseus's side, in with he bad naughty gods that man doesn't need. It renders Athena unsympathetic.

-Io
Oh Io. What are you doig in this story? You're not even really Io. Io was a cow, and she didn't (successfully?) turn down Zeus, either. In this story, Io turned down the attention of an unamed god (Although I'll assume Zeus), and was cursed with agelessness and also a regenerating wardrobe so that she could suffer by watching her loved ones die of old age and poor fashion. Weh Weh. She has been watching Perseus since he was a child, and is in a sense a mother figure (Perseus has three fathers, and three mothres @_@). However she is also his romantic liason! She helps him, and in a sense replaces Athena's role by giving him some advice and guidance. No one seems to question her presence even though she comes out of nowhere and tags along with the boys. She can sort of fight but still needs dramatic rescuing. She gets killed by Calibos (one of Perseus's fathers @_@), and Perseus avenges her, and then sort of forgives him, ish? She urges him to go stop the Kracken and save Argos. Anyway, at the end of the movie, after Perseus again refuses Zeus's offer to come and live on Olympus as a god, Zeus brings her back to life and gives her to his son as a present. "I wouldn't want you to be lonely, have a chick!" Palm to face, brain boggled. Girl = reward! Nevermind all your other dead friends... Ugh. She smiles benignly.

-Athena
I may have mentioned that she isn't in this movie. Well we see her standing with the others on Olympus, and I am told (though I don't specifically remember) that some of the goddesses get lines off screen. Other than that we don't hear a peep from any of them, and they just stand in the background and look decorative. The same is true for most of the Gods, though.... Apollo randomly has a line, and Poseidon gets a bit of a say. But no ladies. And no Athena. Fail.

Other than that it is pretty much a sausage fest. Oh, also, unrelated to ladies, Pegasus (who is not born of Medusa, but is tamed more like the ones from the original movie) is *black*. There are other white pegasi, but they aren't badass enough for our manly hero. No no, he gets the fancy black horse. Eye roll.

Cringing anthropologist

So, first off... Cassiopia, Andromeda, and Kephus are supposed to reign in Eithiopia, not Argos. But that's unsurprisingly whitewashed. Couldn't have a black woman touted to be prettier than all the blonde haired, probably-blue-eyed goddesses that hang around as background eye candy. Bleh.

Secondly, the Jinn!
I don't know why these guys are here at all. They are the magic black dudes that aren't even allwed to be actually black. They're made of trees or something. They dress like the Tureg (blue men of he desert), and are sort of inspired by Islamic mythology (Jinn or Djinn are wild desert spirts, and/or the race that was created after angels but before humans, and made from fire). In the movie, they are basically evil and only sidng with Perseus because they have a common hatred of the Gods. No one trusts or likes them other than the hero. They are so the Other that they aren't considered human by anyone. They aren't even capable of intelligible speech. I'm not sure I'm being as coherent as I would like, but it is coopting other cultures out of context, and Othering them completely. Oh also they abandon the group, save for one token (black) dude who helps kill Medusa. When Draco tells Persus to remember that 'men did this' (which mostly... they died), I'm not sure if it is meant to exclude his part, or include hism as a man.... although since Medusa's power didn't work on him, I'm assuming the former. I don't know the character name, but if anyone can confirm or deny that he is 'Sheik Suileman' from the imdb cast list, that would be aweome, because then I'll know if I shoudl be more pissed or not :V I don't know who else it would be, though, as there were no other really Islamic elements.

Since I dont' realy see the theme of this movie (we don't need the gods) as having anything to do with Greek mythology, I sort of wonder if they included this random Islamic element to extend some sort of weird olive branch and imply that they don't need their god(s) either? I don't know, but also, ugh.

Okay, so, those are the things that pissed me off, I have spent way too much energy on ths movie, ugh.