In ancient times, everyone lived perched on the edge of a cliff. No, seriously. In the case of the deities, I’m sure it’s for dramatic effect, but even peasants live in villages carved into the face of the living rock, overlooking a steep, sheer drop down into the unforgiving ocean. Acrophobia must not have been invented yet.
In ancient times, everyone lived perched on the edge of a cliff. No, seriously. In the case of the deities, I’m sure it’s for dramatic effect, but even peasants live in villages carved into the face of the living rock, overlooking a steep, sheer drop down into the unforgiving ocean. Acrophobia must not have been invented yet.
In one of these villages lives Theseus, played by Henry Cavill of Stardust, and his mother Aethra, aka Anne Day-Jones from Source Code. People make fun of his mother because she isn’t married. In the original myth of Theseus, his mother is a princess, so I’m guessing she didn’t take any flak for being a single mother. The movie sort of implies that Zeus is Theseus’ father, but the myth says his father was either Poseidon or possibly King Aegeus of Athens. Apparently they considered both of them to be Theseus’ father, which is a neat trick.
But like Perseus, Theseus just wants to live his life and protect those he cares about, like his mother and Old Man, which is all the credit poor John Hurt (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) gets in this flick. This quickly becomes impossible, of course, or we wouldn’t have a movie. Mickey Rourke from Iron Man 2 is King Hyperion, and he’s on the warpath. He’s king of the Heraklions, though I’m not sure where they’re from. Heraklion is a city in Crete today, but it wasn’t renamed that until 1898 and the city itself wasn’t even founded until 824 AD, whereas the movie is set in 1228 BCE. These Heraklions scar their faces to look more intimidating and then cover the scars with masks. I don’t get it, either. The point is, Hyperion doesn’t like anybody, and his endless supply of soldiers follows him blindly. They attack Theseus’ village, Kolpos — at least I think that’s what it’s called, but that seems to be a generic Greek word for an ocean bay or inlet — and much slaughter ensues.
What Hyperion really wants, though, is something called the Epirus bow. It’s pretty neat, actually. You pull the string, and an arrow made of energy appears, ready to be fired. And it’s also the only way to free the Titans, imprisoned by their kids, the upstart gods and goddess of Olympus. In Greek myth, Hyperion was a Titan, so that may be one reason why he wants them freed.
Theseus ends up traveling with Freida Pinto from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, who here plays Phaedra, a Sibylline Oracle who prophesies doom; a thief named Stavros, played by Stephen Dorff of Public Enemies, and a monk played by Greg Bryk of Saw 3-D. The monk doesn’t talk. He didn’t take a vow of silence; he just doesn’t have a tongue. The movie is really very bloody in parts, though I’m sure he faced worse in Saw.
This unlikely crew blunders around and ends up neck deep in the fight against Hyperion. People are gathering for a last stand at Mount Tartarus, even though there is no such place, Tartarus being the ancient Greek name for Hell. On the other hand, there are so many other things wrong with the movie, you start forgetting about little details like that. I was mostly noticing that Mount Tartarus seemed to be next to the Hoover Dam.
There’s a really big, implausible battle sequence — well, implausible you expect, but what bothered me the most is that even I could spot huge tactical advantages that the defenders completely failed to make use of. If you want divine intervention, though, there’s a lot of that. They never do satisfactorily explain why Zeus (Luke Evans from The Three Musketeers) is so interested in Theseus, or why immortals are so easy to kill, or why the Titans act like mindless killing machines instead of former deities. Bitter over their imprisonment, maybe?
The Titans all look exactly alike, and Zeus and company mostly look silly. They all wear weird headdresses that are supposed to symbolize what they’re in charge of: Ares has one made of sword blades (though at first I thought he was Apollo and they were the rays of the sun) and poor Poseidon (Kellan Lutz of Twilight) has to wear two giant seashells on his head. The Sibylline Oracles have it worst, though, since they can only go outside when cleverly disguised as floor lamps. I’m not kidding.
They took out the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, which was one of my favorite parts of the Theseus myth — well, not took out completely, but changed it around so it wasn’t as much fun. They use a real ancient torture device called the Brazen Bull (though it’s actually from the 500s BCE), but everything else seems so utterly unhistorical and even unmythical that I just pretended it was set in a parallel dimension.
If you don’t mind unhistorical and don’t know much about Greek myth, you’re all set. I can only manage three out of five, and yes, I know, other people are liking it much more than that, but I can’t help it. It was at least more fun than epic — which sounds wrong, I know, but I always thought that was where 300 went most wrong, by making everything grand and huge and important instead of just human once in a while. These characters are more fallible… certainly where dress sense is concerned… and that’s not such a bad thing. Mostly.