The recent premiere of the remake of Wrath of the Titans (Clash of the Titans) takes up the ancient myth of Perseus coming from the Greek mythology.
But the licenses for the new script, already existing in the original 1981 version, on this occasion aroused a real rage among the most fervent scholars of the classical mythology.
In fact, you don’t have to be a great connoisseur of the subject to feel a certain disappointment regarding the plot of the film. The anachronismscultural mixtures, and reductionisms always end in a plot poverty that only with a lot of indifference we managed to get around.
Wrath of the Titans (2010) chronicles the adventures of Perseushero and demigod whose myth was transmitted orally throughout the generations of the Ancient Greece.
The most paradigmatic episode in the history of Perseus is your fight against jellyfishthe Gorgon snake-haired capable of turning people to stone with just a glance.
In the film, jellyfish lies in the Underworld (to reach her Perseus must bribe Charon), and appears as one of Charon’s evil agents. Hades. In the myth, however, jellyfish has nothing to do with Hadesbut it is one of the three gorgonsfemale and terrifying monsters, daughters of Phorcis and Ceto.
There are other fabulous creatures in Wrath of the Titans that do not correspond to Greek mythology, and that come from other traditions. The most emblematic case is krakenalthough there are also giant scorpions and djinnlittle geniuses or goblins of the Semitic culture.
Already by the simple sound of the word “kraken” we can notice that there is something strange about him. It is that, in reality, the kraken it was a monster norse mythology, an immense cephalopod that attacked from the depths of the sea. In the myth of PerseusInstead, the creature trying to devour Andromeda it is simply described as a large sea monster. and does not interact Argus.
But the most serious part of the misrepresentation of the myth of Perseus maybe it lies in them “titans”. First, no titan appears, who were ancient gods defeated by the second gods, “Olympic”, Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, etc. Second, the gods that appear in the film were reduced to a typical and anachronistic struggle between good (Zeus) and evil (Hades), which has nothing to do with complex Greek mythology.
In conclusion, to see and enjoy Wrath of the Titans it is better to forget the myth of Perseusas the writers apparently did.
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