There are certain artifacts that are a product of their era. They have a certain analogous relationship with a place and time that can never be replaced. Imagine Huey Lewis and the News and Back to the Future and you’re automatically in a 1980’s mindset. Remade vintage pieces of nostalgia can not survive in the self-important digitized world of today. Listening to Huey Lewis and the News via an MP3 download or the time-traveling DeLorean getting the CGI treatment just do not comply with each other. One has already happened and one will hopefully never happen (with so many remakes being made it is only a matter of time before Back to the Future is desecrated for a marginal profit.) Now, think Clash of the Titans (1981): “Release the Kraken”, Bilbo, Ray Harryhausen stop motion puppetry, epic yet sloppy storyline, etc. Ok, now that you have taken a swim down the river Styx of your memory, savor it, and then take out a few of those elements you enjoyed as a kid and replace it with empty pompous spectacle.
Point of the matter is that I have not yet had the chance to check out the remake for Clash of the Titans (2010), so I don’t know if Louis Leterrier is aimed to pleasantly prove me wrong or disappointingly prove me right. Either way, from the trailers and the word of mouth, it only seems like another failure at recapturing nostalgia. If it is a failure, then the question is why? I mean the story elements are there, the technology is superior, and the characters seem to stem faithfully from their Greek mythological ancestors. Also, if you go back to the 1980’s version you eventually find that it is isn’t as great as you remember. Even though it isn’t as particularly remarkable as before, it still reminds you of that one night you stayed up late to find out if Peruses would ever defeat Medusa and save the foxy Andromeda from the Kraken.
Maybe, it is because Clash of the Titans (1981) is a captive to its era. We can’t dissociate the time period from the work. Therefore, when you take something like this out of its time and try to update it with a sense of self-important story telling, it kind of leaves a shallow hole where the magic used to be. It’s like the difference between listening to the The Who on a vinyl for the first time and then, years later, listening to them on your IPod. It’s just not the same, some of the technical quality might be better, but the feeling just isn’t there.
