10 / 10
Official trailer
Jason and the Argonauts is Ray Harryhausen’s masterpiece. Don Chaffey directed it. Todd Armstrong plays Jason. Nancy Kovack plays Medea. Honor Blackman plays Hera. Niall MacGinnis plays Zeus. Bernard Herrmann composed the score in his fourth and final collaboration with Harryhausen. The film made approximately five million dollars on a less-than-three-million dollar budget and is one of the foundational fantasy adventure films. Tom Hanks has said publicly that this is the best film ever made and that he’s never been able to convince anyone else of this.
I’m with Hanks, or close enough that I understand why he keeps making the case. Few films give me this much pure joy, and every creature in it feels more alive to me than anything a computer has rendered since.
The film stages the Greek myth of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece across about a hundred and four minutes, and every set piece is a gift: the talking prow of the ship, Hercules and Talos, the harpies tormenting the blind prophet Phineas, the clashing rocks, the hydra and the skeleton army. Taken together, I don’t think any fantasy film has matched them.
The Skeleton Army
The skeleton swordfight in the third act is the most famous sequence in Harryhausen’s career and among the most famous in any fantasy film. Seven skeletons emerge from the soil of Colchis, armed with shields and swords, and attack Jason and two of his Argonauts. The sequence runs approximately three minutes of screen time. Harryhausen took roughly four and a half months to animate it.
The technical achievement is the coordination of seven independently animated skeletons interacting with three live actors who had filmed their fight choreography months earlier.
Every skeleton has to move correctly relative to every other skeleton and relative to the actors. The choreography is staged so that each Argonaut faces multiple skeletons and the audience can always tell who’s fighting whom. The sequence is the single most labor-intensive piece of stop-motion animation in any feature film of the era.
Harryhausen later said the skeleton fight was his personal favorite of his career, and I agree with him. The moment those skeletons rise out of the soil of Colchis gives me a thrill that no modern effects shot has come close to.
For Writers
A signature sequence in a creative career is usually the one that took the most labor relative to its runtime. The skeleton fight is three minutes that took four and a half months. The lesson is that the work that matters most often costs the most. If you find yourself doing the calculations and concluding that the labor is disproportionate to the output, you may be looking at the most important thing you’ll produce. The disproportion is the signal.
Talos
The bronze giant Talos is the film’s first major creature sequence.
Hercules and Hylas have broken into the treasure chamber of an island temple. The titanic bronze statue Talos comes to life and pursues them. The sequence is staged with a slow, mechanical menace. Talos moves with the weight a bronze man of that size would have. His joints creak. His shadow covers the ground. His death, when Jason removes the plug at his ankle and lets the ichor drain out of him, is among the most haunting deaths in any creature feature.
The choice to give Talos a clear vulnerability the audience learns about from Hera’s earlier exposition is the kind of payoff structure that most monster films don’t bother with. The film establishes the plug.
The plug comes out. The giant dies. The film has set up every beat of the sequence by the time it concludes.
Talos is the creature I find most haunting. The creak of his joints and that slow, heavy menace make him feel ancient and indifferent, and his death, with the ichor draining from his ankle, is sadder than a monster’s death has any business being.
For Writers
A creature’s specific vulnerability, established early and exploited late, is more satisfying than generic combat. The film establishes Talos’s plug before the audience needs it and uses it when the audience has been waiting for it. The lesson is that writers should plant setups for major payoffs with real distance from their use. If you tell the audience about the vulnerability and then have it exploited five minutes later, the structure feels mechanical. Plant the seed and let it grow.
The Gods
The film’s framing device is Mount Olympus, where Zeus and Hera watch Jason’s quest on a large basin of water and intervene selectively. Niall MacGinnis as Zeus and Honor Blackman as Hera play the gods as parents whose interest in mortal affairs is both real and exhausted. The film’s argument is that the gods are real, that they intervene, and that their own rules and disagreements limit their interventions.
The gods are not malevolent. They have favorites and rivalries. Each has a fixed set of interventions they’re allowed to make per hero, and Hera has used most of hers by the third act.
The mythology is treated with the same rigor as a procedural drama treats its institutional rules. The audience can keep track of what the gods can and can’t do at any given moment.
This version of Olympus is a joy. Zeus and Hera bicker like tired parents running a board game, and I find the rules they play by more interesting than the magic systems in most modern fantasy franchises.
For Writers
Supernatural beings work better when they have rules they must follow. Jason and the Argonauts gives the gods a clear system of intervention with limits. The audience can predict what the gods can and can’t do. The lesson is that powerful entities in fiction become more interesting when their power is constrained. Unlimited power is boring because the entity always wins. Limited power forces the entity to make choices. That makes them characters instead of plot devices.
Craft Note
Don Chaffey directed. Jan Read and Beverley Cross wrote. Ray Harryhausen animated and co-produced with Charles H. Schneer. Bernard Herrmann composed the score, his fourth and final Harryhausen collaboration. Todd Armstrong as Jason. Nancy Kovack as Medea. Honor Blackman as Hera. Niall MacGinnis as Zeus. Released June 1963. Approximately three million dollar budget. Approximately five million dollar initial gross. Filmed in Italy. The skeleton fight took four and a half months to animate for approximately three minutes of screen time.
Does Jason and the Argonauts still hold up?
10/10. This is Ray Harryhausen’s masterpiece, and the skeleton fight alone would justify the rating. Bernard Herrmann’s score gives every set piece the grandeur of myth, and the film treats the Greek stories with a respect nobody has bettered in sixty-plus years. I can’t find a flaw in it worth mentioning, and it’s the first film I’d hand anyone who wants to understand why stop-motion still matters.
