Wrath of the Titans is supposed to be a bad movie, but it refuses.
The movie picks up 10 years after Clash of the Titans with Perseus (Sam Worthington) living as a fisherman, grieving after the death of his wife, Io, and taking care of their son, Helius (John Bell). As a demigod, he is called into action when Hades (Ralph
Fiennes) and Ares (Edgar Ramirez) trap Zeus (Liam Neeson) and kill Poseidon (Danny Huston) in their attempt to unleash Kronos (Special Effects). Perseus must venture into Tartarus (Hell, basically) to retrieve Zeus, whose power is being sapped into Kronos.
Wrath of the Titans is a sequel in name only. From their pool of directors, writers, editors and producers, Wrath and Clash of the Titans share only editor Martin Walsh and producer Basil Iwanyk.
Story makes the jump from one to the next, but tone does not. Where the first feels like a particularly bad episode of Power Rangers, the sequel is a disaster movie with compelling, though overdone, strings of family drama.
Wrath of the Titans has simple strength — it’s easy to watch. The movie explains its characters’ many familial relations well. Viewers don’t need to be well-versed in Greek mythology to understand what’s going on.
Neeson and Fiennes make their conflict believable, and Bill Nighy dazzles as Hephaestus. Even Worthington, a very bad actor, presents himself well in the context of the drama.
The film would have done well to shift its genre from CGI action to a more relatable family drama, but in its current state, Wrath of the Titans focuses squarely on action, and that’s a little sad.
While the sequences themselves are OK, protagonist vs. a green screen doesn’t float boats the way protagonist vs. antagonist does. Aside from Perseus’ fight with Ares, which is, predictably, a compelling sequence, all the fight scenes are the former.
CGI action is handicapped as a genre because, even when done properly, it’s only OK.
Something else bothersome is that Wrath of the Titans bases its world more in Judeo-Christian archetypes than Greek mythology. The script goes out of its way to cast Hades as Satan’s direct equivalent (Hades was neither good nor evil, he minded his own considerable business) and Zeus as Jesus (Zeus overthrew his father, Kronos, and then had a lot of unprotected sex, much of it adulterous or incestuous).
This series could have been exactly the same without calling on Greek mythology, which it does in name only.
A final note — in this universe, the gods are fueled by prayers, and the conflict is caused by Zeus running out of prayers and not being able to maintain his works. The mechanic pops up again when someone prays to Ares despite his betrayal of humanity. It’s a neat concept for a pantheon, and it makes gods seem less like gods and more like politicians. But, that being the case, shouldn’t there be a newsletter or something?
