Remember how when we were all getting juicy in the loins for The Clash of the Titans remake, and they announced reshoots? Well reshoots are a double edged sword because you don’t know if they are fixing something that was so terrible, or if they are going to mess with something that was fine already.
Well it looks like Clash of the Titans might have just been of the latter!
THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS – IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE, YOU ARE NOW WARNED
While I did enjoy the movie and didn’t mind that they changed things, it appears that now we are hearing what could-have-been as we get a peek at the movie BEFORE the reshoots. CHUD has a long article about the changes but I am going to sum it up and comment here:
Nearly two thirds of the business with the gods was edited out of the film, and the very tenor of the god scenes was changed in fundamental ways.
Danny Huston was cast as Posiedon, and as in my review I said it was disappointing to see this court of the Gods and the rest of the major dieties are just standing around like so much decoration. Well it seems there was a LOT of discussion and involvement of other Gods in those scenes that was simply removed from the movie.
Zeus is the bad guy. He’s a god who has sort of lost it, and it’s unmistakably his fault that the humans have turned against the Olympians.
I liked his struggle of “loving the humans too much” but knowing that he was originally portrayed as crazy might have played out better. Give mankind a REAL reason to rebel against the gods instead of just Hades trying to frak things up.
The very nature of Perseus’ quest is quite different in the original version.
In the original cut, Perseus IS jonesing for Andromeda, and while he does take a grandeur viewpoint that no person should be sacrificed to placate the Gods, and this is why he fights back – he still has the hots for her. Gemma had been quoted in interviews that Io had a sibling respect for Perseus, and the romantic storyline was with Andromeda, which would have given her a bigger role. Obviously their romance was added later. This might also explain why some felt they were not that convincing as a couple. Perhaps that Gemma was the bigger name, they switched it up.
Zeus has a mysterious and unexplainable change of heart about Perseus, his bastard son. While Perseus is on a quest to destroy the gods Zeus shows up and helps him out, which doesn’t quite make sense. In the original script (and the original cut) it wasn’t Zeus who showed up to give Perseus the coin he needed to cross the River Styx – it was Apollo. Having Zeus all soft for his creation made sense that he would try to reach out to his bastard son, but in the original script he was looney toons to the end and it was another God who delivers the coin, which would make sense if Zeus’ hissy fit was to stand.
This would all have cleared up a lot. The reshoots were intended to steer the film differently, but without redoing the whole film these “fixes” would still look clumsy at times. And they did. I didn’t notice some of them until now, but there they are.
And the closing scenes would have had far different value and feeling too. Andromeda would have got her Prince, and Io would have died having served her destiny. Instead Io gets the brush off and as a reward, Io (who was once “cursed” with eternal life – her words) is resurrected.
There is also a scene where Perseus goes to Mt Olympus and attends the court of Gods just to stick it to his crazy bio-dad, telling him to step off. Instead the movie ends with Perseus fulfilling Io’s warning that the Gods would give him what he wanted and make him less a man. And they do.
Would you have preferred to see THAT version of the movie?
Maybe they will do a Lucas like Special Edition that remasters those cut scenes and uses the original footage before the reshoot to make a Director’s Cut with the above changes!
And then while they are at it they can make Pegasus white so the fanboy purists can shut up too.
