9 / 10
Official trailer
Clash of the Titans is Ray Harryhausen’s final film and his farewell to the medium he helped invent. Desmond Davis directed it. Harry Hamlin plays Perseus. Laurence Olivier plays Zeus.
Judi Bowker plays Andromeda. Burgess Meredith plays Ammon. Maggie Smith plays Thetis. Ursula Andress plays Aphrodite. Claire Bloom plays Hera. Susan Fleetwood plays Athena. The film is an adaptation of the Perseus myth, featuring Medusa, the Kraken, Pegasus, Calibos, Bubo the mechanical owl, the Stygian Witches, and the giant scorpions.
The film made approximately forty-one million dollars on a fifteen million dollar budget and was the most commercially successful Harryhausen production at the time of release.
I adore this movie. It’s big, sincere and a little creaky, and every creature in it has a handmade weight that computer effects still can’t fake for me.
Knowing it was Harryhausen’s last film makes me love it more. My one real gripe is the man at the center of it, and even he can’t sink it.
The cast ranks among the most heavily decorated of any fantasy film of the period.
Olivier was seventy-three. Smith was forty-six and would later become the actress everyone knows from Harry Potter and Downton Abbey. Burgess Meredith was seventy-three. The film treated its Greek mythology with enough seriousness that accomplished actors signed on to play the gods. The result is a fantasy adventure with weight that later imitators rarely matched.
Medusa
The Medusa sequence is the film’s centerpiece and one of the great horror sequences in any fantasy film. Perseus and a small party descend into the temple ruins where Medusa lives. The sequence is shot in firelight.
Medusa crawls along the temple floor on her snake body, firing arrows from a longbow while her head’s serpents move independently around her face. The audience can hear her tail dragging on the stone before they see her.
The animation work is among the most sophisticated of Harryhausen’s career.
Medusa’s snake body, her independently moving head-snakes and her bow-and-arrow combat are each far more complex than typical creature animation, and Harryhausen committed about four months to the sequence. The result is the only Medusa in cinema history that consistently frightens audiences who already know the myth. That tail dragging on the stone is the reason this film sits at 9 for me. I know exactly what’s coming and it still makes my skin crawl.
For Writers
A mythological figure the audience already knows can still surprise them if the execution is fresh. Few creatures in Western mythology are as familiar as Medusa. The audience knows what she looks like and what she does. Harryhausen made her terrifying by adding details that aren’t in the myth, like the longbow and the dragging tail. The lesson is that familiarity with source material isn’t a reason to play the source straight. The details you invent within the established structure are what justify the retelling.
The Cast
Laurence Olivier as Zeus is one of his last major film performances.
He plays the god as a regal, slightly exhausted patriarch who’s fond of his half-mortal son Perseus and limited in how directly he can help him. The Mount Olympus scenes have Olivier in dialogue with Maggie Smith’s Thetis, Claire Bloom’s Hera, and Ursula Andress’s Aphrodite. The four-way dynamic among the goddesses is the film’s most underappreciated material. The gods are pursuing different agendas. The mortal plot is the mechanism through which their disputes get resolved.
Harry Hamlin’s Perseus is the film’s weakest leading performance, a problem the production never fully solves. He looks the part and delivers the lines, but he doesn’t have the range to match what Olivier and Smith are doing. This is my one real complaint. Whenever the film cuts from Olympus back to Perseus, the air goes out of it for me, and I’m grateful the script keeps handing him monsters to fight instead of speeches.
For Writers
A weak protagonist can be compensated for by strong supporting work. Clash of the Titans builds an ensemble around Harry Hamlin that’s so strong the audience doesn’t need much from him. The lesson is that protagonists don’t always have to be the most convincing characters. Sometimes the supporting cast is doing the actual emotional work and the protagonist is the audience surrogate moving through the story. Both approaches are valid.
The Kraken
The Kraken is the film’s final creature and a hugely ambitious Harryhausen design. The sea monster emerges from the harbor of Joppa to claim Andromeda. The animation work involves multiple tentacles, a massive central body, and integration with crashing waves and a stone city under threat. The Kraken’s destruction by Perseus using Medusa’s severed head is the film’s climax and among the most-quoted fantasy sequences of the 1980s. “Release the Kraken” has become a cultural touchstone disconnected from its original context.
Harryhausen designed the Kraken as a four-armed humanoid sea creature instead of the squid-like thing of later popular imagination. The choice was deliberate. He wanted something that looked like nothing the audience had seen before. I think he nailed it. That upright bulk rising out of the harbor at Joppa is stranger and scarier than any tentacled blob, and I’d take it over every CGI sea monster that came after.
For Writers
Iconic creature designs come from bold structural choices instead of from generic creature templates. The Kraken in Clash of the Titans is humanoid with four arms. The audience remembers it because the design is distinctive. The lesson is to commit to particular structural choices when designing creatures. Distinct weirdness is more memorable than generic menace. The Kraken’s structure makes the audience say “Release the Kraken” forty years later.
Craft Note
Desmond Davis directed. Beverley Cross wrote. Ray Harryhausen animated and co-produced with Charles H. Schneer. Laurence Rosenthal composed. Harry Hamlin as Perseus. Laurence Olivier as Zeus. Judi Bowker as Andromeda. Burgess Meredith as Ammon. Maggie Smith as Thetis. Claire Bloom as Hera. Ursula Andress as Aphrodite. Susan Fleetwood as Athena. Released June 1981. Approximately fifteen million dollar budget. Approximately forty-one million worldwide gross. Harryhausen’s final film. He died May 7, 2013 at age ninety-two.
Does Clash of the Titans still hold up?
9/10. This is Harryhausen’s farewell, and I think it’s the right one for him. Medusa is the creature sequence I’d show anybody who asks what he could do, the Kraken is iconic, and Olivier and Smith give the Olympus scenes real weight. Hamlin is the only thing keeping it from a 10. The 2010 remake threw all that handmade craft away for noise, and it was a dumb trade. Watch this one as the closing chapter of a career that defined fantasy cinema for forty years.
