The way it panned out, I kinda suspect that an earlier draft of the script made it so the big third act reveal would have been that Ares really had died of his injuries thousands of years ago and that everything that was happening was the fault of humans being humans...but then someone got cold feet and decided that the movie needed less introspection on morality and more knockdown drag-out fighting between a god and a demi-god for the third act.
That's all just speculation on my part of course. It could also have simply been the case that the third act was always troublesome from the get-go and what they ended up with was an imperfect compromise.
That's all just speculation on my part of course. It could also have simply been the case that the third act was always troublesome from the get-go and what they ended up with was an imperfect compromise.