“Wrath of the Titans” is not actually any good.
It has a large (enough) budget, it has a(n over-)qualified cast, and its plot is (moderately) coherent. It is not, however, any good. It’s not even mediocre; it is inanely mundane and its greatest failing is a lack of imagination. In addition to lack of overarching story despite the presence of plot, this sin can be more relevantly subdivided into three separate domains of lack of ambition: it is not cinematic, it is not sufficiently insane, and it lacks humor.
It is tastefully bland.
I.
We have set pieces, we have CGI, we have actors and lines; we have a beast released to theaters and on DVD.
There are many descriptions of movies as a medium or even art form. They are moving pictures; they are pictures (static) put into series (one after another) and then set in motion (an illusion, but convincing). They are filmed drama, something staged preserved for posterity, with the camera our surrogate eye. Film then goes beyond these metaphors, extending while also preserving them. A given theatrical performance requires — usually! — an audience member to be static, to be there for a set time, to see only one ‘take’ of a scene, to experience continuity; a movie can in contrast remain theatrical while abusing all of these expectations, by moving the camera or by eliminating its tradition point of view, by jumping and cutting, or even by providing a continuity that is temporally and spatially impossible ‘in real life’. The audience sees only surface and is a fixed size; but the ‘camera’ can go inside, and relative sizes may be shifted. A movie may be a sequence of images, but it can incorporate what traditional pictures themselves cannot. Even before CGI we had model-building and world-building, visual and special effects; movies have never been limited to reliving the real. To be cinematic is to explore and exploit the medium — a two-dimensional and sequential presentation that can play with three spatial dimensions and improvise with time in direction and duration –, to do more than record, repeat, or merely recreate.
In “Wrath of the Titans” there is no exploitation, merely exposition. Locations and objects are not used spatially or temporally; they merely signify ideas and relations, which are then manipulated for symbolic effect. Blocking is conventional at best and usually haphazard; performances are an afterthought. Despite the attention to detail, the props provided are not presented for their physicality. We are given a labyrinth, but is is not really explored, we never feel trapped in it or like we or the protagonists are solving it; it’s merely a delaying tactic, another pitstop along the way to picking up another plot-token; this reminds of a conventional video game without the ability to play, only to observe. The Greek army — and the battle it takes part in — seems like an afterthought; the CGI monsters are extras composed of spare clothes from a thrift store.
It is not poetic.
The movie does not play with rhythm, meter or melody, even though blaring music blasts in the background. Fights are short cuts and shortcuts, nearly incomprehensible compilations of thrusts and glowers, grunts and sprayed-on sweat. It is a movie of closeups and objects against backgrounds, not choreographed subjects interacting in foreground, middleground, and background, taking advantage of space and spatiality. As audience members we neither feel part of the action nor that we are observing something staged; it’s a muddle.
It is sight and sound and words from a page cleaned up in ADR and post-production. It is a movie, but it is not cinema.
II.
The material is mythological and already ‘unrealistic’, fantastical. We have gods and monsters; then they want to give us a titan. But they trample myths.
We perhaps expect the cyclops (or plural) to be shepherds and encountered by Odysseus; we need the minotaur in a different labyrinth. We expect more from Hephaestus and reference to Aphrodite, especially if Andromeda — already mythological — takes on the semblance of the former, if Perseus stands in for Zeus, if Agenor ‘the Navigator’ likewise functions for/as Poseidon; should they not ‘become’ them when the others fall? Hephaestus the fallen tool-maker and god is analogous enough to Prometheus but without a love of/for humanity, should not the latter appear in a movie about Titans, plural? We namecheck gods who do not appear; did we only have a budget to pay for Édgar Ramírez after the ham-funds for Fiennes and Neeson were dispersed?
But they move toward the discursive. Zeus shows up to provide exposition. Motivations are merely human psychology and reducible to oedipal complex issues. And yet gods and titans … gods and monsters! This is myth and mythology and myth-building; it has been argued that comic book superheroes are (post-)modern mythological figures of sorts, but they’ve become commonplace in our cinema and other pop culture, and in a reversal of fortunes mythological figures are traded here as mundane spandex currency. There is no shock, no awe, nothing sublime and no grandeur. There’s barely a passing mention of the titanomachy, of a Golden Age before Olympus, or any reason why anyone should care — if Zeus and Hades are so negligent at best and abusive more generally — whether titans get out … oh, except that they are the Big Bad of this here film production.
This is mundane and inane.
I need insane.
I see gods ‘die’, become statues, and turn to dust, and I see a glimpse of the cinematic, a glimmer of the poetic. I see dust and I see sand and silica. I see silica and I think computers, I think nanites, nanobots, replicators. I see a giant lava-Kronos and think, again, of minerals, and wonder why this titan and its ilk and its similarly mineralistic monstrous brethren could not be early-generation nanotechnology, and the gods, their offspring, much more like the human-form replicators of late-season-SG1. After all, this movie stars Sam Worthington, who here plays a demigod and earlier performed the role of a human-machine hybrid in the Terminator franchise; it would be fitting for such demigods to be cyborg-like, or even robot-like in a Rossum sort of way. I especially like the idea of a toy and tool-making Hephaestus being mainly mechanism, of Hades fearing oblivion because his ‘soullessness’ is part of his machine-nature, of Aress’ and Zeus’ quips about free-will a matter of following programming.
If, following Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, let mythology be a little bit Eternals, a little bit Ancient Astronaut, and not a little primordial gray ooze of a prehistoric post-singularity.
Be fanatical about your fantasy; show some ambition.
III.
It cannot be said that this movie does not attempt some comedy.
Neptune’s son, Hephaestus, some visual gags; they’re there. Agenor (Toby Kebbell) is our comic relief, not just a buffoon, but a rogue, and Worthington’s Perseus is our straight-man, a serious father with a son to look after. There are attempts at chemistry, though they fall flat when actual jokes make their way into the ether. Bill Nighy’s Hephaestus is not a little mad and his workshop and his performance offer a few laughs and gags; he is ‘the fool’. Perseus’ awkwardness on the pegasus, Agenor’s capture in the cyclopses trap … these are worthy visual gags that combine choreography and wit.
The movie’s overall tone, though, is serious. Worthington barely smiles, and Pike as Andromeda mimics him. Ramírez as Ares frowns rather than snarls, and Fiennes as Hades mopes his way through a paycheck. Actors barely have time to develop chemistry when they are portraying ciphers rather than characters and so no significant feelings can be built up or conveyed. This is all material that could be weighty and almost tragic, but isn’t. We credit Stalin as saying, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic”; there is no tragedy here, but we kill CGI extras by the render-farm-load during a climactic battle sequence. This should impart upon us the importance of the undertaking, but it’s merely a movie in which the ending — the hero wins! saves the day! — is foregone conclusion. Characters are written out of the script — die — when their function has been performed, not when or because we feel a loss at their deaths, not because they made decisions that led through a chain of inevitable events, cause-and-effect, to doom. One extra makes a mistake in praying to Areas; he arrives and kills her. Our heroes must progress, so Bill Nighy offs himself. We need to conclude a pair of father-son and two-brothers storylines, so Liam Neeson takes a bullet for Ralph Fiennes and holds on long enough to say goodbye to his estranged son, Sam Worthington. Worthington chastely kisses queen Pike and departs with his warrior-to-be son.
This is portentous, perhaps. It’s quite mechanistic and formulaic … and empty. It’s not profound, sublime, or tragic. It’s straight-faced but not especially serious.
The movie does not require comedy; it ought to be cosmically humorous.
It needs to revel in absurdity, wit, and cheer. Agenor must be played as an Odysseus figure, not just comic relief. Someone needs to twirl a mustache. Somewhere the absurdity of volcano-CGI Kronos, the supposed father of Huston-Fiennes-Neeson, needs to be remarked upon.
IV.
I reflect on these thoughts, on these conclusions, on these consequences partially as a result of rereading Fr. Schiller’s “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (“Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung”, 1795) — or at least significant portions of it — today. It’s not an especially long essay, but it’s an at times difficult and precise one.
Schiller’s thinking tends toward the binary and the moral; that is, he thinks in either-ors, and when one option is overloaded, he will divide it in two again. Insted of something providing the options A, B, and C, Schiller gives us A or B, and B can furthermore be divided into B1 and B2, let’s say. Poetry, for example, can be naive or sentimental, the sentimental — dealing with ideas (rather than with concrete nature) and with a gap between reality and ideal, can treat this material then as either satire or elegy. Satire then as one or the other, elegy as one or the other … this is the model of thinking. There is never a mean in between, just another division. And furthermore Schiller gravitates toward the moral; while Kant’s critical period is essential for understanding what he is undertaking, whereas Kant sets up the aesthetic as a mostly autonomous third realm of inquiry, Schiller always wants to move it toward the moral, and subsume the beautiful and sublime under the good as a goal.
But this has little to do with tonight’s movie.
Except that tonight’s movie is, if we must pick between naive and sentimental, a sentimental work. It traffics heavily in ideas or at least in mimicry of them. It hints at family drama and conflict. And, yet, the feelings one would associate with such situations seem mainly and strangely absent; we have little sense/feeling of urgency or haste, of duty or obligation, of love or even really of hatred. I imagine thematizing their curious absence as somehow appropriately “characteristic” (of a certain people) or indicative of a strange world-plot twist, such as the nanite version above, or a world in which all characters are cognitive zombies, perhaps mere puppets, a fictional world in which we explain the limited affect and mostly emotionless performances not as a relic of the script or the acting or the directing, but as intentional and meaningful.
And this, too, would be sentimental.
But perhaps a special kind of genius, one in tune not with the accepted and established limits of cinema but with unpredicted possibilities, could make a naive production, one about sense and sensuality, one about living mythos, not logos, one filled with experience rather than reflection. Another kind of intuition, another kind of imagination would have to be at play.
But this was not that movie and this is not that essay, for each would needs be sublimely and childishly indecent.
