Forget the dragon. The monster this weekend was the Kraken and Clash of the Titans, which hacked its way to $61.4 million—much of it coming from extra-pricey 3-D tickets. The mythology-soaked CGI spectacle pocketed twice as much as its nearest competitor, Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? How to Train Your Dragon, last week’s box office champ, slithered into third place with $30.2 million, while Miley Cyrus’ The Last Song warbled into fourth ($16.2 million).
I don’t think, though, that Clash will be too titanic for too long. We didn’t like it much, and most other critics didn’t like it, either (its 30% approval rating at rottentomatoes.com is positively spoiled). Bob Hoose, our reviewer on the job, said the film’s 3-D—installed retroactively after the movie had already been made—was pretty disappointing, and the action was so frenetic and confusing that it actually seemed to take away from the excitement.
Christians might take issue with the film’s Greek mythology, too, though historically, lots of Christianity’s best writers have repurposed pagan gods and legends to illustrate Christian truth. When I watched the trailers, though, the theological sticking point that struck me was more a sense of rebellion—where Perseus tells us that he’s ushering in a new age of man. The subtext I took from that was that, perhaps, the film was saying the age of gods (or of God?) is over, and that man must take control of his own destiny.
Now, Bob tells me that Clash itself isn’t pushing humanism or atheism or pantheism or, really, any -ism at all. It just wants to sell tickets. Did you see the movie? What was your take?
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