Two Geeks Three Cats

There was exactly one thing I liked about the new remake of Clash of the Titans: Gemma Arterton's bare left shoulder.

All right, I'll admit that two other things in the movie were okay, but with qualifications. The boat of Charon, ferryman of the dead across the river Styx, was really spiffy even though it looked like it belonged in a video game. And Ralph Fiennes acted the hell out of a cliché role as Hades, even though fans of the Harry Potter films may find Fiennes' wheezing, icy-eyed villain irritatingly familiar.

That's it. That's all the film has going for it ... with sympathy for Liam Neeson, who delivers his lines as Zeus with the same sad resignation he wore on his face throughout Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, not even wasting the effort to use his considerable talent trying to redeem an underwritten part in an awful script.

Of these few positives in the film, the presence of Gemma Arterton was the only one that kept me from walking out of the theater. (Believe me, I thought about walking out a lot.) Arterton, whose brief turn as Bond girl Strawberry Fields was the best five minutes of 2008's 007 snoozefest Quantum of Solace, did a similar service for Titans, being the only thing on the screen I wanted to look at more than my watch. But don't mistake the object of my praise: Arterton is great, but her character Io – a once-human woman cursed with immortality and bearing no resemblance to the Io of Greek mythology - is one of the bigger problems with Titans. The victory she scores on screen is attributable not to the writers or director, but to some happy accident of Ms. Arterton's apparently superior genetics, which makes her incredibly easy on the eyes. She radiates in every scene, despite the best efforts of the filmmakers to make her not stand out with unbecoming costumes and several terrible hair moments. And this gets at the biggest problem I had with the film.

See, Clash of the Titans doesn't really suck for any of the reasons you may have heard or read. It's not because of Sam Worthington's poor performance, or because there's not enough of Neeson's Zeus or Fiennes' Hades. It's not because they made Pegasus black or because Andromeda – Perseus' love interest in the original film and the myth – is all but written out of the story. It's not because they kept in the worst crimes perpetrated against Greek mythology by the original Titans (Kraken, I'm looking at you) or because they took even more liberties with the source material. Yes, all those things suck, but they aren't why the film sucks. The film sucks because it suffers from an ugly, offensive and childish ideology.

Clash of the Titans takes place in an unrealistic ancient Greece where human beings have chosen to reject their gods in favor of a vague “freedom” that's expressed in overly simplistic terms. In this world, humans – no, men – think themselves above the gods, who need the prayers of men more than men need the blessings of the gods. Did the ancient Greeks ever have any such attitude toward their religion? Of course not, but that's irrelevant. The filmmakers are more interested in telling a story that resonates in locker rooms and playgrounds in the twenty-first century than they are in paying homage to ancient Greek religion and stories.

The result is a bullheaded, macho story that is as blunt as it is stupid. It is a world where Greek heroes wear buzzcuts and ride black horses because it looks more badass than curly locks and gleaming white steeds. It is a world where men vie for penile dominance by pushing each other around – literally – and insulting one another without remorse or humor. And most offensively, it is a world more misogynistic than anything the ancient Greeks left behind ... it does worse than objectify women; it marginalizes them.

This world has no use for women. There are exactly five speaking female roles in the film, and one of them has snakes for hair. With the exception of Arterton's Io, all of them have less than ten minutes on screen. And none of them does anything to move the story, including Io, whose primary purpose is to explain things to Perseus, and the audience, that we need to know. Cassiopeia (played by Caprica ballbuster Polly Walker, but with none of the matronly gusto of Siân Phillips in the original) does not enrage the gods with her pride; the gods were already angry at something her husband did. Andromeda (played by Alexa Davalos) does not win the heart of Perseus and urge him to complete his quest; Perseus does it for his father. Medusa is reduced from the nightmare-inducing monster of the original to a giggling snake-bimbo. And Io, for all her charms, does not belong in this film. She wanders through it, looking nice, yes, but mostly just keeping quiet and staying out of the way of the menfolk who are trying to work ... and the fate she suffers at the end of it might just be the most offensive thing of all.

Beware.