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Clash Of The Titans (2009)

Technobuilder

Technobuilder

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Rear Admiral
I'd only been paying tangential interest to this remake project until today.

I saw a rough cut of the trailer and the special effects (what were finished) looked great.

If the sea monster at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest, had been substituted for the KRAKEN at the end of this trailer, that film would of ended on a WOW! instead of a whimper.

If you've ever taken one of those 'Movie Surveys' at the mall, you'll be able to figure out how I saw it.

Oh yeah, Liam Neeson as Zeus seemed like a good choice from what 2 secs I saw of him and the Medusa was great.
 
Hopefully, some bootlegged footage will get on youtube soon.

I own the original and would be interested to see what this one looks like.
 
The original was one of my favourite movies as a kid! While I'm not sure they'll capture the charm of Harryhausen's stop motion effects at their peak, I'm still really looking forward to this remake.
 
T'Baio said:
The original was one of my favourite movies as a kid! While I'm not sure they'll capture the charm of Harryhausen's stop motion effects at their peak, I'm still really looking forward to this remake.
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^QFT

I own the original on DVD and still pull it out semi-regularly.
 
Loved the original - I saw it as a kid and it seemed like magic. I'll be there for the remake.
 
This is one remake I'm actually looking forward to. I still think the original works quite well (and certain scenes are absolute classics), but definitely love the idea of a more intense, kickass version too.
 
The idea of remaking a Harryhausen movie still strikes me as odd, because those movies were mainly worth watching for Harryhausen's effects rather than their stories. So "Let's do the same story but with different effects" seems kind of like doing a remake of a porn film without the nudity and sex. It feels like missing the point. Sure, the FX would be "better" today, and could be a lot bigger and flashier. But films like that are a dime a dozen today. What Harryhausen did was exceptional for its time and special on its own. It's a lot harder for an FX film today to stand out from the pack. Even the allegedly revolutionary Avatar is getting lukewarm reactions.

So if they're trying to do the same thing Harryhausen did, light on story and heavy on FX, it'll just be another interchangeable CG-fest. Although it will no doubt be "bigger" on an absolute scale, it'll be a smaller achievement in comparison to the contemporary state of the art. Maybe if it had a really impressive cast, it would be something, but all it's got is Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, whereas the original had such luminaries as Sir Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Ursula Andress, Burgess Meredith, and Maggie Smith.

The only way I can see this really being worthwhile is if the filmmakers thought of a way to build a richer, truly interesting story out of the basic concepts of CotT, maybe something that's more authentically grounded in Greek mythology, say. But what are the odds of that?
 
Christopher said:
The idea of remaking a Harryhausen movie still strikes me as odd, because those movies were mainly worth watching for Harryhausen's effects rather than their stories. So "Let's do the same story but with different effects" seems kind of like doing a remake of a porn film without the nudity and sex. It feels like missing the point. Sure, the FX would be "better" today, and could be a lot bigger and flashier. But films like that are a dime a dozen today. What Harryhausen did was exceptional for its time and special on its own. It's a lot harder for an FX film today to stand out from the pack. Even the allegedly revolutionary Avatar is getting lukewarm reactions.

So if they're trying to do the same thing Harryhausen did, light on story and heavy on FX, it'll just be another interchangeable CG-fest. Although it will no doubt be "bigger" on an absolute scale, it'll be a smaller achievement in comparison to the contemporary state of the art. Maybe if it had a really impressive cast, it would be something, but all it's got is Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, whereas the original had such luminaries as Sir Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Ursula Andress, Burgess Meredith, and Maggie Smith.

The only way I can see this really being worthwhile is if the filmmakers thought of a way to build a richer, truly interesting story out of the basic concepts of CotT, maybe something that's more authentically grounded in Greek mythology, say. But what are the odds of that?
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You know, I was going to write something, but I realized that my thoughts matched this post exactly, so I am quoting it for truth.

I'll add that Harryhousen was genius. Sure, I can still see the stop motion, yet somehow, despite the fact that I know the trick, I can still tense up watching Perseus fighting the scorpions. I really was scared of the two-headed dog back then and watching that moment today still gives me the willies. And, of course, Medusa. everything about that scene, from the lighting to how much the creature was not shown (the restraint Harryhousen had to let the tension build) were just absolutely perfect.

Indeed, the original film still scares me. I don't know Harryhousen was able to pull it off, but I still get the same feelings (less exaggerated) watching it now as I did then. He knew how to tap in what made the scene tense as well as how to pull it off, at least him and the director.

I guess it's also some of the content. Though not an effects shot, it gives me the willies when a film opens with guys putting a healthy young woman and her child into a coffin and tossing the coffin in the sea.
 
Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
I'll add that Harryhousen was genius. Sure, I can still see the stop motion, yet somehow, despite the fact that I know the trick, I can still tense up watching Perseus fighting the scorpions.
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I think of Harryhausen's stop-motion as the filmic equivalent of pointillism. Yes, you can tell it's a created image made of discrete pieces, and you wouldn't mistake it for reality, but it's still a work of art.
 
NOBODY will ever capture what Ray Harryhausen did in ANY of his films. It's not even worth trying.

I have met the man on many occasions and have been an afficianado of his work for years.

The man was a genius. What he was able to do with those stop motion models was...well...pure genius.

They might do a better job technically with the remake, but I doubt they'll capture the same mood and character Harryhausen did.

As brilliant as CGI is...it never feels as "warm" as stop motion did. And stop motion just seemed to fit the kinds of stories Harryhause told in his films...
 
QuasarVM said:
NOBODY will ever capture what Ray Harryhausen did in ANY of his films. It's not even worth trying.

I have met the man on many occasions and have been an afficianado of his work for years.

The man was a genius. What he was able to do with those stop motion models was...well...pure genius.

They might do a better job technically with the remake, but I doubt they'll capture the same mood and character Harryhausen did.

As brilliant as CGI is...it never feels as "warm" as stop motion did. And stop motion just seemed to fit the kinds of stories Harryhause told in his films...
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His work on COT wasn't very good and basically finished off stop motion in movies.
 
RAMA said:
QuasarVM said:
NOBODY will ever capture what Ray Harryhausen did in ANY of his films. It's not even worth trying.

I have met the man on many occasions and have been an afficianado of his work for years.

The man was a genius. What he was able to do with those stop motion models was...well...pure genius.

They might do a better job technically with the remake, but I doubt they'll capture the same mood and character Harryhausen did.

As brilliant as CGI is...it never feels as "warm" as stop motion did. And stop motion just seemed to fit the kinds of stories Harryhause told in his films...
Click to expand...

His work on COT wasn't very good and basically finished off stop motion in movies.
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It was excellent...just like all the others.

Where's your movie? Who else can you name that can do all of that awesome work -- pretty much BY HIMSELF?

And I think quite a few professionals in the VFX field would disagree with your views on what "finished off" stop motion in movies...not the least of which would be Tim Burton.

What "finished off" stop motion was the audience supposedly becoming more "sophisticated"...and thinking stop motion was something "quaint" and not up to standard.

The art was on it's way out after Star Wars (1977). Much of that had to do with the public's fascination with all things space.

People were (I exclude myself from this), by that time, not much interested in the mythological stories that Harryhausen's films were mired in.

Still, Harryhausen took one last grand stab at stop motion in 1981 and I thought it was a great Harryhausen film...
 
Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
They used some stop-motion techniques. My favorite use of them is the "Let the Wookie win" scene
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True...those guys at ILM were/are huge Harryhausen fans...and then too stop motion was pretty much the only way you could do that scene with the game characters...at the time.

Unless, you used the man-in-suit technique...which would have been cheesy.
 
RAMA said:
His work on COT wasn't very good and basically finished off stop motion in movies.
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First off, Clash of the Titans was the only film where Harryhausen had assistant animators rather than doing all the work himself, so maybe that's why you perceive a change in the quality of the work.

Second, there were many major uses of stop-motion in cinema after CotT, mostly the work of Phil Tippett at ILM. There were the tauntauns, AT-ATs, and Rancor in Star Wars, there was Dragonslayer, there was the mine-car sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, there was the flying-bike sequence in E.T., there were the devil dogs in Ghostbusters, there was the bat Gremlin in Gremlins 2, etc. Probably the last great stop-motion special effects set pieces in a live-action film were Tippett's work in RoboCop 2.

What "finished off" stop-motion was the advent of practical, realistic CGI. When Spielberg was making Jurassic Park, he intended to use stop-motion for the full-length, running, jumping, and other dinosaur shots that couldn't be achieved practically with Stan Winston's on-set animatronics, but then ILM's computer graphics department demonstrated that they could do it more convincingly, and so Tippett's team ended up using digital "puppets" instead of latex-and-metal ones. (Actually the JP dinosaurs were animated using the equivalent of stop-motion techniques, since the animators worked with armatures covered in position sensors rather than latex skin, manipulating them the same way they would work with stop-motion puppets, but inputting their position data into computers rather than photographing them. So it was kind of a hybrid of stop-motion and CG.)
 
Christopher said:
RAMA said:
His work on COT wasn't very good and basically finished off stop motion in movies.
Click to expand...

First off, Clash of the Titans was the only film where Harryhausen had assistant animators rather than doing all the work himself, so maybe that's why you perceive a change in the quality of the work.

Second, there were many major uses of stop-motion in cinema after CotT, mostly the work of Phil Tippett at ILM. There were the tauntauns, AT-ATs, and Rancor in Star Wars, there was Dragonslayer, there was the mine-car sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, there was the flying-bike sequence in E.T., there were the devil dogs in Ghostbusters, there was the bat Gremlin in Gremlins 2, etc. Probably the last great stop-motion special effects set pieces in a live-action film were Tippett's work in RoboCop 2.

What "finished off" stop-motion was the advent of practical, realistic CGI. When Spielberg was making Jurassic Park, he intended to use stop-motion for the full-length, running, jumping, and other dinosaur shots that couldn't be achieved practically with Stan Winston's on-set animatronics, but then ILM's computer graphics department demonstrated that they could do it more convincingly, and so Tippett's team ended up using digital "puppets" instead of latex-and-metal ones. (Actually the JP dinosaurs were animated using the equivalent of stop-motion techniques, since the animators worked with armatures covered in position sensors rather than latex skin, manipulating them the same way they would work with stop-motion puppets, but inputting their position data into computers rather than photographing them. So it was kind of a hybrid of stop-motion and CG.)
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QFT


I love CGI, it's the best way to pull of a lot of stuff. However, I miss the days where they would say "what is the best way to get this particular shot done in our budget? That's how the "Let the Wookie win" scene happened /i mentioned above, as normally you wouldn't think that stop-motion would be needed for Episode 4, but alas, they found a way.

What I'm talking about is innovation. In addition to the films you mentioned, there are many films that stand out as innovative, and often they don't merely use CGI. Though not a "stop motion" film per say, the frame to frame detail and the combining with live action plates needed for Who Framed Roger Rabbit make that a benchmark in film making using tried-and true techniques.
 
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