THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #76

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

The Writers

Adolph Green and Betty Comden; song lyrics by Arthur Freed, Comden and Green

Why It’s Here

Casual fans of cinema are likely not aware that “Singin’ in the Rain”, the title track to what is widely regarded as the greatest movie musical of all time, was not composed for the film that bears its name; the song originally appeared in an early talkie musical, Hollywood Revue of 1929. In fact, with the exception of “Make ‘Em Laugh” and “Moses Supposes”, none of the songs in Singin’ in the Rain were originally written for the film. At the height of the classic studio system, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer was known for producing the most lavish and popular musical pictures in Hollywood, and the production unit responsible for the majority of these eye-popping spectacles was presided over by producer Arthur Freed, who in his former show-business life was a noted lyricist whose most frequent collaborator was composer Nacio Herb Brown. In 1952, Freed decided that MGM’s next major musical production would be a showcase for the extensive backlog of songs he had composed with Brown in the first decade of sound cinema, a catalog to which MGM now owned the rights. So he presented the screenwriters assigned to the production, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with a package of songs and essentially told them, “Build a story around this.” Under those circumstances, one would be hard pressed to expect Comden and Green to deliver even a story that simply made a great deal of sense, much less a cinematic musical masterpiece. But somehow, the screenplay that Comden and Green “slapped together” as nothing but an ostensible framework for their boss’s songs emerged as a benchmark of the studio system’s golden age, and the only live-action musical to find a place on the Movie Zombie’s screenplay countdown.

Taking their cue from the provenance of the film’s songbook, and inspired by the back-to-the-talkies career histories of many of those involved in the production, Comden and Green fashioned a story about the early days of Hollywood sound cinema, and the often brutal growing pains the industry suffered as it converted over to talkies. Perhaps due to the fact that the film’s plot, by necessity, had to exist independently of the lyrical content of its songs, Singin’ in the Rain is one of the rare musicals with a story rich and interesting enough to have potentially supported a film on its own, without utilizing a musical treatment. It is also, and not frequently enough given credit for being, one of the greatest movies about movie-making ever made, an honest but affectionate send-up of virtually every aspect of Hollywood as it was in the early days of the studio system. Comden and Green were themselves old show business troupers, and were able to draw on a deep well of passed-down anecdotes and personal experiences to create a narrative full of hilarious incidents made even funnier by their having been borrowed from real life.

Singin’ begins in 1927, the last year of silent cinema’s reign, at the premiere of The Royal Rascal, the latest production from Monumental Pictures. Outside Graumann’s Chinese Theater, the movie’s star, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), gives a self-serving interview about his early showbiz career that serves as both a sly dig at the studio-manufactured images of Hollywood stars (virtually everything Don tells us about his background is contradicted by the accompanying flashback images) and a deft parody of Citizen Kane’s immortal “News on the March” newsreel scene. Don’s on top of the world, the brightest star in the Hollywood sky, but his rough early days as a vaudeville song-and-dance man, stunt performer, and “mood music” on-set accompanist (a job that Arthur Freed himself once held) have led him to have doubts about his true value as an actor, doubts that are exacerbated after a chance encounter with Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), an aspiring “serious” actress who calls Don’s movie work “a lot of dumb show”. Things get even worse at the premiere party, where Monumental’s studio chief, R.F. Simpson (a great, gruff performance by Millard Mitchell), shows an experimental sound-film reel and announces that Warner Bros. is making an actual sound feature, The Jazz Singer. Nobody expects much from this “talking-picture” gadget, until The Jazz Singer is a smash hit and a panicked Monumental decides that its entire production apparatus will be switching over to sound, including Don’s upcoming period-swashbuckler epic, The Dueling Cavalier. Comden and Green deftly anatomize the countless troubles that went into the studios’ conversion to sound with an uproarious collection of mishaps, most of which were drawn from actual stories from the early days of the talkies. The actors are forced to speak into awkwardly hidden microphones, with sound fading in and out every time they turn their heads. The premiere screening of The Dueling Cavalier is sabotaged when the soundtrack gets out of sync, causing the damsel in distress’s cries for help to seemingly come out of the mouth of the dastardly villain and vice versa. And of course, there’s the problem of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee for this hilarious performance), Don’s leading lady. A rock-stupid nincompoop who believes the studio-planted fan-magazine articles about her and Don being in love, Lina’s got a voice like a klaxon horn, and it completely clashes with her onscreen image as an elegant romantic heroine. This disjunction between image and voice sadly did bring an end to the careers of a number of flourishing silent-era stars (most notably John Gilbert, Greta Garbo’s favorite leading man), but here the situation is played for laughs, and we don’t feel a shred of sympathy for Lina anyway, even though she is easily the film’s funniest character and gets what is, for my money, the picture’s best line when she bellows, in the midst of an egotistical rant, that “I make more money that Calvin Coolidge put together!”

Comden and Green devise a solution to The Dueling Cavalier’s woes that is clever and consistent with the technology of filmmaking. After the picture’s catastrophic premiere, Don figures that his career is over, that he will be a laughingstock and will wind up grinding it out in vaudeville houses again. But then he realizes that he has a secret weapon up his sleeve: Kathy Selden. Turns out that Kathy, far from being the lofty aspiring “Ethel Barrymore” she claimed, was actually a lowly studio contract player (who supplements her income by jumping out of cakes as part of a Hollywood-party chorus line)…not to mention one of Don’s biggest fans. They meet on the studio lot and fall in love, and, with the help of Don’s longtime collaborator, composer Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor, in a Golden Globe-winning performance), come up with the clever notion of transforming The Dueling Cavalier into The DANCING Cavalier, a showcase for Don’s natural song-and-dance abilities. R.F. is skeptical at first. After all, Don may be a talented hoofer and singer, but Lina still talks like a shrieking buzzard, and who can imagine how she sings? Kathy, willing to sacrifice her own career’s forward momentum to help the man she loves, agrees to serve as Lina’s voice, dubbing over both her spoken dialogue and singing without any onscreen credit. (Ironically, the actual “voice” of Kathy performing the romantic ballad “Would You?” was dubbed by singer Betty Noyes, while the speaking voice dubbed in for the shrill, screechy Lina was not Debbie Reynolds, but Jean Hagen herself, speaking in her real, quite pleasant voice.) The picture is saved, but Don and the studio are not out of the woods yet. Lina gets wind of the dubbing subterfuge, and also discovers the studio’s plan to use Kathy’s work on Cavalier as the springboard for a big star push, all the while relegating the pain-in-the-ass Lina to the background. Given the already colossally bad blood between her and Kathy (the chorus girl smacked Lina in the face with a wad of cake at R.F.’s party…though to be fair, Kathy was aiming the cake at Don), Lina threatens to sue Monumental Pictures and make sure that Kathy never works in Hollywood again. It all comes down to the premiere of The Dancing Cavalier, where Lina’s insistence on finally speaking for herself brings her own curtain down, and Don puts his own ego aside to give credit to the real star of his new picture…and of his heart.

This story would be complex enough for a 103-minute picture that didn’t have to include a bunch of songs with only a tangential relation to the plot. Indeed, it’s worth noting that while the songs never actively interfere with Comden and Green’s telling of their story, there are very few moments where the songs seem necessary to the narrative. Most of the numbers are there as diversions, such as the chorus’s performance of “All I Do Is Dream of You” at R.F.’s party, or as showcases for the talents of particular performers, such as O’Connor’s legendary “Make ‘Em Laugh” number, which is so energetic and ebulliently performed that one is willing to overlook the fact that it has nothing at all to do with the rest of the film. Singin’s love ballads, “You Were Meant for Me” (memorably performed by Don and Kathy on a soundstage he carefully arranges for maximum movie-romantic impact) and “You Are My Lucky Star”, are beautiful but not specific to the characters or the story, and the sprawling “Broadway Melody Ballet” sequence, while it provides the always welcome opportunity to gaze upon the glorious Cyd Charisse, practically brings the momentum of the film’s finale to a screeching halt. Still, given the limitations under which Comden and Green were writing this picture, it’s impressive that the songs blend into the story as well as they do, and that even in the most extremely detached-from-the-story cases, they never seem to be simply shoehorned into the film for their own sake. Indeed, most of these songs today are remembered more for their inclusion in Singin’ in the Rain than for their previous life in movies or as songs in their own right. And of course, it would be hard to imagine this film having the same impact without the title number, performed by an in-love-and-loving-it Don in the midst of a torrential downpour on a Hollywood street. The image of Gene Kelly hanging from a lamppost, umbrella in hand, as rain and love wash over him, is one of the most iconic in Hollywood cinema…one made all the more arresting when you know that workhorse Kelly, who also co-directed Singin’ and choreographed the musical numbers, was battling a 103-degree fever when this sequence was shot.

It would be unfair to Freed and Brown’s memorable compositions to say that Singin’ works in spite of the presence of the songs, but Comden and Green’s screenplay leaves much to enjoy besides the musical numbers, something that cannot often be said about even the best cinematic musicals. (Would you want to watch The Sound of Music without the sound of music in it?) Unlike the usually cut-and-dried star-crossed lovers of many musicals, Singin’ actually presents a central romantic couple who are each facing their own interesting dilemma. Their romance, which would, in a lesser musical, most likely take the entire picture to resolve, here is worked out relatively simply, with one heartfelt conversation and musical performance, and this frees up Don and Kathy to engage in much more intriguing personal struggles, albeit now with each other’s assistance and support. Don’s aforementioned issue with his perceived lack of value as an actor is compounded by the studio’s attempts to make him into something he’s not, elocution lessons and all, and the disastrous Dueling Cavalier premiere seems to reinforce his worst beliefs about himself, until Kathy helps him realize that by being what the studio wants him to be, he’s not being true to his own gifts as a performer. Don’s not a dueling cavalier, but a dancing one, and he doesn’t figure that out without Kathy’s help. Likewise, Kathy learns that pretensions to art are all well and good, but if you’ve got a gift like Don has, there’s no reason to be ashamed of sharing it with the world…and she turns out to be quite the natural song-and-dance entertainer herself. Most musicals present us with mismatched lovers in conflict who often don’t resolve their differences until the final reel. Granted, this approach can have its merits (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made several great pictures trading on just this sort of conflict), but it also deprives us of the pleasures of watching the romantic couple as partners, you-and-me-against-the-world style. Singin’ makes Don and Kathy a true couple, united in goal and deed, and it’s a refreshing dynamic to drive a musical comedy forward.

It also helps that Comden and Green have filled Don and Kathy’s world with memorable supporting characters. R.F. Simpson is a marvelously dry boss, alternately tough and fatherly, and he leaves the apoplectic heavy lifting to Roscoe Dexter (Douglas Fowley), the studio’s star director, whose splenetic blustering and incredulous rage at the technological gewgaws he is now forced to contend with never fail to make me laugh out loud. Many of the film’s supporting players are veiled caricatures of legendary silent-era stars. Rita Moreno, in one of her earliest roles, plays Zelda Zanders, a bubbly flapper type based on Clara Bow, while Judy Landon cuts a hilariously imperious figure as Olga Mara, a moody European vamp in the Theda Bara mold. Kathleen Freeman also scores a few big laughs as the elocution teacher assigned the thankless task of teaching Lina Lamont to speak like a lady (“Rrrrrrround tones, rrrrrrrround tones!”). While most of these characters have limited screen time, they all create the sensation of Don and Kathy’s romance playing out in an authentic, fully populated world, while adding to the film’s mode of tough but warm showbiz satire. Lina Lamont is the film’s comic crown jewel, and Comden and Green create a bitch for the ages, a character who alternately fawns all over her leading man (every time he tells her they don’t really have a romance, she obliviously coos, “Ohh, Donny, you don’t mean that”), rages at her boss, and spits venom and rancor at everyone who gets in her way. It’s not until you step back and really look through the comic euphoria created by Hagen’s performance that you realize that Lina is a truly awful person, one of the most loathsome villains in the musical genre, and her comeuppance is thus not just narratively logical, but richly deserved and ever-so-satisfying. Oddly enough, the closest thing the film has to a screenwriting weakness is the character of Cosmo Brown. The role is memorably played by O’Connor, an enthusiastic and energetic performer who holds his own with Kelly in their dual numbers (the early “Fit as a Fiddle [And Ready for Love]”, performed by Cosmo and Don during their vaudeville days, is a highlight) and who shines in his “Make ‘Em Laugh” showcase, dancing wildly with a stuffed dummy and actually backflipping off the walls. He also has a lot of funny and memorable lines, as when he thinks the studio’s conversion to sound will cost him his job as a mood-music accompanist; he laments, “At last I can start starving and write that symphony,” until R.F. informs him he’ll instead be the head of the studio’s new music department, to which he replies, “At last I can stop starving and write that symphony.” Indeed, the film’s entertainment value would be distinctly diminished without Cosmo’s presence…but I still can’t figure out exactly what he’s adding to the story. He gives Don a buddy, sure, but he’s got Kathy, so it’s not like he’s lonely. And he does help the lovers devise their dubbing-over-Lina scheme…but it could just as easily have been R.F. or Roscoe who thought up the idea. Even his performance of “Make ‘Em Laugh” doesn’t add to the narrative. Granted, I wouldn’t cast Donald O’Connor in a big musical comedy and not give him a big musical comedy number, but really the only reason it’s even in there is so O’Connor has a big number. Don’s not primarily a comic actor, after all, so the number doesn’t even really make story sense…funny, considering it is one of the only two numbers that was written just for this film.

Still, in criticizing Singin’ in the Rain’s storytelling, I feel like someone booing a second-grade Christmas pageant. Sure, it’s not perfect (which is why it’s #76 on my countdown and not #1), but if someone gave me a pile of unrelated songs and told me to build a story around them, I’d be lucky to come up with Moulin Rouge!, much less the greatest Hollywood musical ever made. Besides which, if you’re going to go out of your way to find fault with something that has given so much joy and good cheer to people for almost sixty years now, you might want to look into another line of work, because maybe happiness isn’t really your thing. Betty Comden and Adolph Green took on a ridiculous, seemingly impossible storytelling task and succeeded beyond what should have been anyone’s reasonable expectations. You can walk out of any number of musicals humming the songs, but it’s sometimes a chore to remember the plots of even the most tuneful musicals. Singin’ in the Rain has great songs, memorable characters, quotable dialogue, and even, wonder of wonders, a terrific story. It’s more than a great musical. It’s even more than a great comedy. Singin’ in the Rain is a great movie. Period.

AWARDS WON: Writers Guild of America Award, Best American Musical Screenplay

THE ZOMBIE DOES HOLLYWOOD: IT ATTENDS "THE LOSERS" Q&A SCREENING WITH SYLVAIN WHITE!

Sometimes, even a Zombie needs a little fun in his life, and at those times, a good scummy action flick is just what the doctor ordered. That's exactly what Sylvain White's The Losers delivers: a good disreputable Saturday-night entertainment. The last few years have seen a dearth of classic old-school action pictures gracing our multiplexes. Most films in this genre have lately chosen to concentrate on bloated special-effects sequences at the expense of the down-and-dirty pleasures of fights, explosions and hyperbolic gunplay, and even the best recent action pictures, films like The Dark Knight and Casino Royale, are so weighted with thematic heft and "importance" that fun can at times seem to be a distant memory while watching them. No such problems with The Losers. This is a back-to-basics thrill ride, with plenty of stunts and derring-do to keep the pulse racing and just enough comedy to make the film engaging without detracting from the seriousness of the action itself. The original DC / Vertigo comic book series that was the source material for The Losers (written by Andy Diggle and illustrated by Jock) was dedicated to writer / director Shane Black, who, with his screenplays for such pictures as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, was one of the architects of the classic late-'80s / early-'90s style of blood-and-yuks action thriller. This new film, co-produced by action maestro Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, The Matrix), is in the tradition of these iconic bash-'em-ups, serving both as a loving tribute to a classic mode of genre filmmaking and as an injection of fresh new blood into an endangered genre.

The Losers starts out on a grim note that honestly didn't prepare me for the fun to come. In the jungles of South America, a covert CIA unit led by the gruff, stubble-faced Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) find their mission to take out a drug trafficker's jungle lair compromised by the untimely arrival of a busload of schoolchildren. The soldiers manage to get the kids out before the hideout is vaporized, but then their escape helicopter is blasted from the sky by friendly rocket fire, not only killing the innocent children, who the soldiers have placed on board in their stead, but revealing this mission's secret second purpose: take out Clay and his unit. Believed to be dead, and reeling with guilt over the deaths of a few dozen innocent children, Clay and his men go off the grid, hiding out in Bolivia while trying to figure out their next move. Hope for revenge comes four months later, in the enticing form of Aisha (Zoe Saldana), a mysteriously connected woman warrior who wants Clay and his men to return to the states and take out Max (Jason Patric), their former CIA boss, who is up to his neck in dirty dealings and who tried to take out the Losers to keep them from exposing his corrupt ways. Back in the states, Clay's unit must track down Max before he can detonate an illegally acquired super-weapon in the Port of Los Angeles, precipitating an international crisis that will lead to all-out war in the Middle East...and all the money and political power Max and his minions can scrounge. But if there's one thing the Losers know, it's that a world-in-the-balance mission like this is never even that easy, and the unit is forced to contend with divided loyalties, personal pressures, their own sense of betrayal by the government that gave them their purpose, and Clay's growing attraction to the not-who-she-seems Aisha.

Pretty standard-issue stuff, story-wise, but writers Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt fill what could have been a rote explosion-delivery device with unexpected wit. As is usually the case in these men-on-a-mission stories, each member of the Losers has their own quirks, personal vendettas and action styles to bring to the table. Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) is a soft-spoken sniper who has a way with the ladies and a leather cowboy hat you won't touch if you know what's good for you. Jensen (Chris Evans), the tech ops engineer, is like Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt run through the Play-Doh Fun Factory, with a goofy one-liner for every occasion and an unexpected devotion to his eight-year-old niece's pee-wee soccer team (go Petunias!). Pooch (Columbus Short), the group's transportation specialist, has the most intense need to reclaim his life, as he frets throughout the action over his wife, who is carrying his child and believes the baby's father dead. Roque (Idris Elba), the Losers' demolitions expert, provides a strong head for Clay to butt up against, while Clay himself is struggling with his loss of identity in the wake of the violent termination of his commander's status. Each of these characters provides an engaging ingredient to the action, and their distinctive styles of combat and speech prove to be a frothy and engagingly fun entertainment mix. Berg and Vanderbilt provide a few memorable action set pieces, including a spectacular armored car heist in Miami (made doubly impressive by the fact that it's the actual armored car that's being stolen...by air, no less) and a so-crazy-you-have-to-laugh plane-and-motorcycle game of chicken that ends, as one would expect, rather explosively. The writers also ably keep the laughs coming, with most of the comic relief being provided by Evans, particularly in a hilarious sequence in which he invades an office building posing as a bike messenger / tech support nerd to download encrypted files stolen from Max. This sequence, featuring Evans taking out security guards with his "telekinetic" gun-hands and memorably set to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", is arguably the high point of the film and provides ample evidence that, Captain America or no, someone needs to give Evans a great comedy role, and stat.

Director White, whose major previous feature credit was the critically reviled but profitable dance picture Stomp the Yard (also co-starring Columbus Short), proves himself to be a surprisingly dab hand at action direction. His gun battles, chases and fight sequences are staged with pleasing visual clarity and a minimum of shaky hand-held camera work, and he appreciates the efforts of his stuntpeople and special effects team enough to not throw away their work with ill-chosen shots or excessively frenetic cutting. He also finds a harder-than-it-looks balance for the film's action and humor, never allowing one to entirely overwhelm the other and thus throw the entire tone of the film out of whack. David Checel's editing is whitter-quick without sacrificing visual coherence, which seems to be a dying art in most contemporary action cinema (for the most egregious recent example, see the utterly impossible-to-follow visual hash of Ninja Assassin's action scenes), and the cinematography by Scott Kevan, who also shot Stomp the Yard, strikes just the right note between gritty authenticity and comic-book-colorful broadness.

Still, in a team-driven action picture like this, if the cast doesn't work, neither will the movie, and The Losers is blessed with an ensemble of performers who spark off each other in endlessly interesting ways. In a nice contrast to the aforementioned Evans, who provides consistent laughs amidst the mayhem, Jaenada is a classic strong-but-silent action movie badass, preferring to let his molten stare and hot lead do most of the talking for him. Short, meanwhile, provides the vulnerable human face of the Losers, his very real worry over his expectant wife reminding us that these men are men, not just wind-up action automatons. Elba, in some ways, has the most thankless role of the main cast, serving mainly to provide a natural bulwark against Clay's authority, but the actor is so commanding a presence that he gives weight to what could have been a less-than-distinctive character. Morgan, whose portrayal of The Comedian was one of the best elements of last spring's Watchmen, provides this '80s-throwback action flick with a rough, burly, unconventionally handsome anchor that recalls some of Bruce Willis's better early action work. (I also, for whatever reason, really appreciated that this action hero conducts his business in a suit...albeit sans tie, for that perfect rakish touch.) Saldana, one of the hottest young actresses around right now thanks to her impressive motion-capture performance in Avatar, has been singled out by some critics as an unconvincing action heroine, but to my eyes, she more than holds her own, wielding a rocket launcher with panache and going toe-to-toe with Morgan in a brutal dust-up in a burning South American hotel suite. She and Morgan also match, uh, other appendages in a steamy bedroom scene; here, and indeed throughout the picture, White and Kevan never let us forget that the film's female lead is arguably the most beautiful and sexiest woman in movies today. Patric plays the dastardly Max as a surprisingly screwloose spook, politically pragmatic to the point of lunacy, sort of like Dick Cheney meets Blofeld, and he joins Evans in providing the picture with most of its laughs. Still, Berg and Vanderbilt's presentation of a figure of almost cartoonish evil took some of the edge off the Losers' mission, as I never really took Max or his threat seriously. If there's one thing Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker taught us, it's that a comic-book villain doesn't have to feel, well, like something out of a comic book. (I much preferred the no-frills tough-guy henchmanry of Holt McCallany as Max's no. 1 muscle.)

Still, even without a villain for the books, The Losers delivers just what it promises, a slick, well-produced 98 minutes of sexy, funny action escapism, a picture with the kind of easygoing approach to entertainment that elephantine FX monsters like Clash of the Titans would do well to study. In less than two months, Twentieth Century Fox releases The A-Team, a would-be summer franchise picture with a similar wronged-soldiers-get-revenge premise but with all the big-budget, effects-heavy baggage that this Warner Bros. spring release avoids. Time will tell if the box office numbers for The A-Team surpass those of The Losers (and honestly, given the latter film's opening weekend grosses, that will probably not be too difficult), but from an artistic and entertainment standpoint, I would say that Fox has some catching up to do. If it's a great, goofy, light-as-a-feather time at the movies you're after this weekend, you really can't lose with The Losers.

The screening of this film that I attended, at the Landmark Theater in Westwood, CA, was presented by Film Independent and featured a post-film Q&A with director Sylvain White. The Parisian-born White spoke about his pursuit of the Losers assignment as a means to provide a different flavor to his resume after helming Stomp the Yard and numerous notable music videos. He addressed the film's casting as an opportunity to provide fresh faces for this sort of ensemble-driven action spectacle; he enthused about the work of his two-time collaborator Short and expressed his film's good fortune in nabbing Saldana before last year's Star Trek / Avatar twofer made her one of the major actresses in contemporary genre film. White shared some entertaining insights about various aspects of the production. "Don't Stop Believin'" was chosen as Jensen's office-invasion tune over another version of the same scene scored with a Whitesnake song, and the director expressed his admiration for his technical crew's ability to pull off the hotel-fight fire in just one take. The low-key, mellow White seems like a surprising person to find at the helm of a stylish action blowout like this, but after his work on The Losers, my hope is that we'll see more exciting entertainments from this filmmaker in the future. With just the right script and a talented crew behind him, I think that White has it in him to create an action picture to stand alongside all those great films of the '80s that The Losers honors and celebrates.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #77

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Writers

Andy and Larry Wachowski

Why It’s Here

Every few years, it seems, a film will emerge in a particular genre that more or less changes the fundamental nature of that genre for a brief time. After the success of There’s Something About Mary in 1998, virtually every comedy released attempted to replicate its unique blend of sentiment and gross-out shock humor…until 2005, when The 40-Year-Old Virgin made a splash and changed the face of movie comedy again. In the horror genre, every major release for the last six years has been following the grimly moralistic, harshly violent framework established by 2004’s sleeper hit Saw (which itself spawned a franchise that recently saw the release of its sixth installment). And 1999 saw the release of The Matrix, a philosophically ambitious science-fiction action spectacle written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, former comic-book writers with only two prior screenplay credits, 1995’s abysmal Sylvester Stallone thriller Assassins (co-written with Brian Helgeland) and 1996’s critically praised but only modestly successful Bound (which they also directed). Neither of these films would lead one to suspect a game-changing success from The Matrix, but that’s just what the Wachowskis delivered. The film was a major box-office hit, won four Academy Awards, and inspired two sequels, the direct-to-DVD animated omnibus The Animatrix, and parodies of its groundbreaking special effects in everything from Shrek to Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. What’s more, for several years after its release, virtually every Hollywood action film attempted to recreate aspects of what made The Matrix such a one-of-a-kind genre experience. One can see the influence of the film’s labyrinthine internal mythology in the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies, and it soon became commonplace to find action stars from Jet Li to Jason Statham to Steven Seagal suspended in hard-hitting midair in imitation of The Matrix’s “wire-fu” fight scenes. Still, as impressive and influential as the film’s action style has remained in the decade since its release, I believe the reasons for the continued effectiveness of The Matrix as a cinematic entertainment are much more fundamental than matters of fight choreography or special effects. For when you strip away all the astonishing computer-generated imagery, all the wires and leather trenchcoats and bullets, what remains underneath is a story brilliantly original in its details but as classical in its construction as any great film from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Indeed, for a picture as probing in its thematic underpinnings as this, it nevertheless cannot be denied that the philosophies most influential to The Matrix’s narrative are those of Syd Field and Joseph Campbell.

The Matrix breaks down easily into Field’s much-debated three-act narrative structure, each act separated by an easily discernible “plot point” that kicks the story in a new direction. In fact, the Wachowskis’ screenplay is more obviously divided in its act structure than many films in that each act, in essence, exists within an entirely different genre. The film’s first act, while it does include intimations of the film’s overarching sci-fi framework, functions more or less as a mystery. In a green-tinged noir-style cityscape, black-suited agents led by the icily implacable Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) are pursuing a band of rebel computer hackers bent on undermining the authorities of the city for reasons which are, early in the going, left intriguingly oblique. Soon, one of the rebels, the poker-faced, high-kicking warrior Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) has reached out to a fellow cyber-criminal, who was born Thomas Anderson but is known throughout the techno-geek community as Neo (Keanu Reeves), with an offer to answer a question that has haunted his restless sleep for years, a question that he doesn’t even understand, much less know answer to: “What is The Matrix?” Neo at first refuses Trinity’s offer of the truth, but he changes his tune after a tense interrogation by Agent Smith and the horrifying implantation of a cybernetic tracking bug. Trinity leads Neo to an abandoned building, where he is introduced to Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), a hulking but placid guru figure who offers Neo the opportunity to discover the true nature of the world he’s taken for granted all his life. In an elegant visualization of the choice placed before Neo, Morpheus offers him two pills. “You take the blue pill…the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Up until this point, the film has featured the generic trappings of both science fiction (the cyber-bug implanted in Neo’s stomach by the agents) and action (Trinity’s spectacular escape from the agents that kicks off the film), but in the main, the Wachowskis have led us into a fantastically compelling mystery plot, with the ambiguous nature of the agents and the unexplained, seemingly superhuman abilities of Morpheus’s rebels combining to create a sense of intrigue so intense that by the time Neo is faced with his choice, we’re ready to grab that red pill and force it down his throat ourselves.

Fortunately for us, Neo needs no such coercion. He takes the red pill, gets sucked through a mirror Alice in Wonderland-style…and wakes up in the real world, where he’s a literal pod person, a hairless, wired-up husk of a human floating in amniotic gunk in a machine-tooled incubation chamber. He’s loosed from his connection to the pod by a horrifying red-eyed octopus-like robot and dumped down a waste chute, where he’s rescued by the Nebuchadnezzar, a hovercraft with Morpheus and Trinity among its crew. Morpheus welcomes him to “the real world”, and us to The Matrix’s second act, where the film kicks into full-on science fiction mode. Morpheus explains that the world that Neo knew was actually The Matrix, an elaborate computerized pacification program designed by the sentient machines that defeated humankind in an all-out war nearly two hundred years before. The world is a bombed-out shell of its former self, where humans are harvested in fields by the machines and live their entire lives wired in pods, their bodies producing energy to fuel the machines while their minds are controlled and tamed by the Matrix, which provides them all with identities and the psychic sensation of actual lives…all to keep them producing energy and away from the notion of rebellion against the machines. (In another clever visualization of their story’s philosophical concept, the Wachowskis have Morpheus brandish a Duracell battery to illustrate what the machines and The Matrix have reduced mankind to; this also explains the rebels’ earlier reference to the still-Matrixed Neo as “copper-top”.) Morpheus and his crew are humans who have escaped from the Matrix’s clutches and are planning a revolt against the machines, to be led from the city of Zion, the last human stronghold of this machine-controlled world. Neo has been freed because observations of his psychic activity while within the Matrix have led Morpheus to believe that he is “The One”, the super-powered cyber-messiah who will ultimately defeat the machines and lead mankind to its salvation. The bulk of The Matrix’s second act, which is basically a long sequence of complex-but-elegant exposition, consists of Morpheus teaching Neo the ways of The Matrix, how its “reality” as a computerized construct enables the humans who provide its sustaining energy to manipulate it to suit their needs, creating clothing and weapons and gifting them with superhuman, gravity-defying abilities of combat. The agents are revealed to be control programs within the main construct, implanted by the machines to keep order and battle the insurgents when they re-insert themselves into The Matrix; the agents thus possess the ability to be anywhere at all times, as The Matrix can morph any “citizen” into an agent as need be. Neo is trained in a myriad of fighting styles, learns that he can leap superhuman distances within The Matrix, and that his heightened reflexes now grant him the ability even to dodge point-blank-fired bullets (which he demonstrates in the film’s celebrated “bullet-time” FX sequence). He also pays a visit to the Oracle (Gloria Foster), a kindly old woman who lives within The Matrix, training other gifted cyber-warriors who may or may not be The One. Here, he encounters a young boy who has figured out how to bend spoons with his mind, simply by realizing the fundamental truth of mastering The Matrix: “There is no spoon.” The Wachowskis also reveal here that if you are wounded or killed while jacked into The Matrix, the same fate befalls your real-world self…a threat which becomes very real when Nebuchadnezzar crewman Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) turns traitor and sells Morpheus out to the agents, with the understanding that he’ll be jacked back into the “ignorance is bliss” world of The Matrix once the rebels are defeated. (One thing that’s amusing about The Matrix is the charming lack of subtlety in the character’s names; just as Neo is an anagram of “One”, it should come as no shock to us that the human who wants to be turned back into a docile Matrix slave is named “Cypher”.)

Morpheus’s capture by the agents brings down the curtain on the sci-fi-heavy second act of The Matrix. The Wachowskis have now laid out all the rules of the film’s world and given us a glimpse of the spectacular powers that Neo will have at his disposal…powers that come into big-time play in the third act, when the rebels launch a rescue attempt and the film turns into a full-blown action flick, an eventuality in light of the film’s being produced by Joel Silver, the action thriller wizard who gave the world Die Hard and the Lethal Weapon series. As the Nebuchadnezzar crew battle an encroaching attack by the machines’ cybernetic “sentinels”, Neo and Trinity jack into the Matrix to lead a full-scale attack on a high-rise office building where the agents are torturing Morpheus. Neo performs a death-defying bullet-dodging ballet in the building’s lobby, and we reflect on how satisfying an action sequence can be both when it is given adequate narrative buildup and when the characters’ superhuman abilities are given solid logical underpinnings within the story. This ultimately leads to a spectacular smackdown between Neo and Agent Smith in an abandoned subway station, and it is indeed in this third act that Agent Smith truly blossoms into a formidable character, one of the most memorable villains in science fiction cinema. It falls to Smith to serve as the mouthpiece for the machines’ disdain for the beings that created them and ultimately became their slaves, and his language is that of every fascistic oppressor since time began, verbally reducing his detested adversary into something subhuman and utterly beneath his contempt. He refuses to call Neo anything except “Mr. Anderson”, essentially referring to him only by his “slave name”, and in a great speech while torturing Morpheus, he explains his view of humans as a “virus”, the “cancer of this planet”, and that the machines are nothing more than “the cure”. Hitler couldn’t have put it better himself. Up until this final showdown, we have had our doubts that Neo can pull off the heroic acts we expect of him; after all, the Oracle has told him to his face that Morpheus’s assumptions were wrong, that he is not “The One” after all. But as Neo’s human body quakes and convulses with the force of Agent Smith’s inner-Matrix pummeling, Trinity reveals to him that he has to be The One…because the Oracle told her that The One would be the man with whom she would fall in love. The Oracle was wrong. And in a great reveal, we see the world for the first time as Neo, as The One, sees it. He can now see “into” The Matrix, revealing this amazing computer-generated world as nothing but a series of scrolling green computerized numbers. It’s nothing but a program. And as long as one human can see The Matrix for what it truly is, the hope of mankind can never be shattered. Morpheus is saved, the sentinels are defeated before they can destroy the Nebuchadnezzar, and though the film ends with The Matrix still reigning over most of mankind, Neo is out there, and ready to lead mankind to its ultimate destiny: “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see…A world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.” Thomas Anderson is dead. There is now only Neo, and in the film’s triumphant final shot, he soars like Superman, like Jesus Christ, up into the skies of the computerized world he has mastered.

In addition to serving as a textbook example of Syd Field’s three-act screenplay structure, the film is also a perfect point-for-point iteration of The Hero’s Journey, the “monomyth” that has served since time immemorial as the basis for tales of mythological heroes and which was definitively delineated in Joseph Campbell’s seminal 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. George Lucas has explicitly acknowledged his debt to Campbell’s work in his creation of the Star Wars mythos (a truth I touched upon in my review of The Empire Strikes Back), and though the Wachowskis have not likewise credited Campbell’s theories with providing the backbone for The Matrix, the signposts of The Hero’s Journey are inescapably embedded in their story. Neo is a classic Campbellian Hero, a naïf who exists in a world free of conflict and strife, until he is called to action by a Herald figure, in this case Trinity, who comes to him in a techno club and first poses to him the question that will drive the further action of the story. As is customary in The Hero’s Journey, Neo at first refuses the call to action, preferring his simple, static (but at its core unsatisfying) life. He changes his tune, however, when his interrogation and bugging by the agents forces him into the conflict against his will. Soon, he meets Morpheus, the Obi Wan-like Mentor figure who teaches him the ways of The Matrix and prepares him for his role in the coming conflict. There is also what Campbell calls “The Journey to the Inmost Cave”, in which the Hero must enter a place on his own to obtain some special object or insight that will ultimately spell success on his quest. Here, it’s the apartment of the Oracle, where he gains his essential knowledge not from the Oracle, but from the young boy who tells him, “There is no spoon.” Neo’s path to heroic conquest is bedeviled by Campbell’s Shapeshifters, trickster characters who exist in malleable forms, potentially heroic one moment, evil the next. Neo here is facing Shapeshifters both figurative (Cypher, who turns traitor) and literal (Agent Smith, who can be anywhere and anyone within The Matrix). Finally, Neo “defeats the dragon” when he learns to see the true nature of The Matrix and beats Agent Smith in combat, and he “returns with the treasure” of his newfound vision of the world, his now-superhuman inner-Matrix abilities…and the heart of Trinity, his true, tangible real-world prize. I have seen The Matrix several times now, but this viewing was the first in which its fidelity to Campbell’s monomyth occurred to me. That is a testament to the Wachowskis’ skillful usage of The Hero’s Journey formula; it’s done so deftly that unless we’re looking for it, we don’t notice the formula at all.

The Matrix was popular with many of its fans not just for its spectacular action set pieces and filmmaking innovations, but for the probing ahead-of-its-time questions its narrative posed. One of the bestselling books of recent years has been The Secret, in which a formula is posited whereby average people can use the power of their minds to manipulate the universe into granting them the money, success, love and good things they want or feel they deserve. This notion of the universe as a malleable construct, easily controllable by strong-willed humanity, is already a key component of the narrative of The Matrix, in which Neo has to learn how to manipulate The Matrix in order to affect the liberation of mankind. The film poses fundamental queries about the nature of reality, queries even more urgent than ever in a world of “reality” television, 24-hour-a-day cyber-stimulation, and titanic advances in the fields of image manipulation and graphic sophistication. (Some of these same questions about the nature of reality were posed, with equal skill, by #89 on this countdown.) The machines that have overtaken the world in The Matrix are essentially an advanced evolution of the nuclear machines that hung the ever-present threat of annihilation over mankind’s heads throughout the Cold War era, and the film also grapples with age-old notions of theology, the idea of a messiah figure sent by unseen forces to rescue mankind from its own misdeeds and lead them into a new promised land…a new Zion, as it were. Granted, The Matrix is not a film that is particularly groundbreaking in its philosophy or especially sophisticated in its interrogatory approach, but in a Hollywood genre picture, it’s rare to find such questions even being asked, and I think it was this thematic ambition, as much as anything else, that endeared the film to its cultishly devoted fans. Indeed, balancing this kind of philosophical probity within a still-satisfying genre action spectacle is not an easy task, a fact the Wachowskis themselves proved with 2003’s financially profitable but dramatically unsuccessful sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (which overwhelmed its action with near-impenetrable philosophical theorizing) and The Matrix Revolutions (which did just the reverse, burying its thematic complexities beneath sound, fury and special effects overload).

The failings of the trilogy as a whole, however, do not diminish the achievement of The Matrix as a supremely intelligent and exciting piece of science-fiction storytelling. The summer of 2008 saw the release of The Dark Knight, the film that I believe will unseat The Matrix as the signal text for the next generation of action blockbusters. That said, in its combination of stirring action set-pieces with thematic and philosophical ambition, The Dark Knight itself owes no small debt to The Matrix…and not just because the heroes of both films dress in black.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Award, Best Writing; Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award, Best Screenplay; Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Award, Best Script

FRESH FROM THE GRAVE: IT SEES "CLASH OF THE TITANS"

In its ongoing effort to prove its understanding of the psychology of red-state America, Hollywood's major Easter-weekend release this year is a story of the hate-hate relationship between humans and a pack of petty, vindictive pagan gods. Of course, the story of Jesus Christ, and indeed the benchmark tales behind many of the world's religions, owes much to the myths of classical antiquity, as do our great secular myths, also known as "the movies". Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides...the poets and playwrights of ancient Greece taught us much of what we still know about the creation of character, the establishment of conflict, indeed the very act of dramatic storytelling itself. There's a reason modern-day screenwriters are still encouraged to read Aristotle's Poetics: for the most part, this stuff still works. Unfortunately, the makers of Clash of the Titans seem to have forgotten most of those lessons, because if there's one thing this movie doesn't know how to do (and there is more than one, but we'll get to that), it's telling a dramatically compelling story.

As in many of the classic Greek dramatic tales, Clash of the Titans gets rolling when the gods get angry, and as is also usually the case, mankind is the cause of their grief. It seems that the gods' immortality depends on the continued prayers of the mortals; their love is the only thing allowing the gods to continue their dominion over all of creation. Mankind, however, has grown weary of the gods' jealous, callous, and seemingly wantonly cruel behavior, and after centuries of being abused with famines, plagues, and the generally baseless cruelty that makes up what we call "life", the citizens of the Greek city-state of Argos have declared open war on the gods, kicking things off by sending a huge statue of thunder god Zeus, ruler of Mount Olympus, into the sea. This notion, that the only thing that gives our various gods power over us is our faith in them, is actually a heady one for an early-spring action bash, so it is naturally not dealt with in any sort of dramatically or intellectually engaging way. Instead, we're essentially given a re-working of the basic situation of the Book of Job. Hades (Ralph Fiennes), despised ruler of the underworld, comes to his brother Zeus (Liam Neeson) with a proposition. Since the people will no longer pray to the gods of their own volition, they must be forced to pledge their fealty, and terror and imminent destruction seems to be the only way to do it (all of this, of course, plays to Hades's advantage, as he, unlike all the other gods, draws his strength from mankind's fear rather than their love). Having taken this page from Dick Cheney's playbook, Hades visits Argos and declares that in ten days, he will unleash his mightiest weapon, the deadly sea beast known as the Kraken, unless the Argosian princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos) is sacrificed for the salvation of all. But the people of Argos have a champion in their midst. Perseus (Sam Worthington) is a fisherman whose boat and family were destroyed by Hades in the aftermath of the statue's destruction, and he wants nothing more than to destroy the indestructible king of the underworld, so he sets off with a band of Argosian warriors to find a means to defeat the Kraken. But Perseus's greatest war is with his own nature. It turns out that he is a demigod, the result of a tryst between a human woman and Zeus, who disguised himself as a gods-hating king (Jason Flemyng) and stole into the queen's bedchamber. Forsaken by Zeus, Perseus sees himself as a man only, and at first refuses to draw on his godlike powers of combat and special weapons in his quest. But it's not too long before he's swinging around a magical sword and galloping through the air atop the mighty winged Pegasus en route to his showdown with the Kraken.

I worry that the paragraph above makes this film sound much more compelling than it actually is, and indeed, it's hard not to describe it in a manner that makes it sound interesting, since the building blocks of the story (conflicted heroes, magical weapons, seemingly insurmountable foes) are those of all great drama throughout all of history. It's a pity, then, that screenwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (working from Beverley Cross's script for the 1981 Clash, a film I have not seen) are not able to combine these can't-miss pieces into a dramatically satisfying whole. Perseus and his band of not-very-merry men trek across burning Middle Eastern wastes, where they battle Perseus's now hideously mutated human stepfather, whose spattered blood morphs into fierce, gigantic scorpions. They encounter a grotesque trio of blind Stygian witches, the Fates of old, who give them crucial information about how to defeat the Kraken. Perseus takes on the snake-headed Medusa, who turns men to stone with her gaze...and who just may be able to do the same to a Kraken. And I just didn't care.

There are few moviegoing experiences more unsatisfying than a film full of characters you just don't give a damn about, and that's pretty much all I was given to work with by Clash of the Titans. Perseus is a singularly uninspiring hero, whose declarations that Zeus is not his real father and that he is not a god grow boring after the first dozen or so times he makes them. The gods themselves are tremendously unsympathetic, willing to torture and kill humans to prove just how much those humans should love them (this is admittedly a problem with the philosophy undergirding most of the world's major religions, so I can't really blame the Clash writers for that). Plus, there's barely enough of them in the film for us to even get to know them. Zeus and Hades are the only gods with even a hint of character development; Zeus's son Apollo (Luke Evans) has maybe two lines, and sea king Poseidon (the great Danny Huston), who is Zeus and Hades's other brother and should thus by rights be a major player here, has only one line of dialogue. The citizens of Argos are a largely undifferentiated mass, rushing about shrieking at the latest assault hurled down at them by the gods. Few of Perseus's band fail to make an impression, from the pair of hunters brought in as ostensible comic relief (at least I assume that's why they were there, though they didn't make me laugh once) to Draco, the grizzled veteran warrior who teaches Perseus how to wield a sword and carry himself like a man. Draco is played by Mads Mikkelsen, so soulful and haunting in last year's Flame and Citron; here, his entire head seems weighed down by his beard, and he barely lifts his chin far enough off his chest to clearly recite his dialogue.

Not that we're burning to hear that dialogue anyway. Three screenwriters working in tandem have managed to give us a script without a single memorable line, not even anything memorably awful. Everything these characters say is either blatantly expository or woefully repetitious, which means half the time they're just giving us information, and the other half, they're giving us the same information again. The result of this is that the major action set pieces, when they come, carry virtually no dramatic weight, and exist purely as showcases for stunt work and special effects. This wouldn't be a problem if the f/x themselves weren't so varied in quality. The Kraken is a reasonably impressive creation, all tentacles and turtle-headed aggression, and I applaud director Louis Leterrier's decision to never show the entire creature in one shot; the bits and pieces that we do see gives the impression of a creature of almost immeasurable size and menace. The desert battle with the scorpions, however, is marred by poor compositing, so much so that it almost never looks as if the monsters and their human combatants are really in the same shots. The Medusa effects are competently rendered but are just not that compelling, while the Pegasus, thankfully, manages to be both visually convincing and powerful, probably because it's likewise used sparingly. The most impressive visual effect in the film is the Stygian witches, and this is largely because they are not a CGI effects creation, but rather a trio of lumpy, misshapen, sperm-whale-foreheaded gray things brought to live entirely with prosthetic makeup effects. Their loathsome menace is thus rendered tactile, a genuine threat to our heroes, and they serve as perhaps the film's best homage to Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion genius who provided the creatures for the original 1981 Clash.

Leterrier is a filmmaker who I have thus far defended as a throwback to the great old-school action directors, a man with the kind of skill and finesse to elevate a pulpy B-movie martial-arts thriller (the underrated Jet Li actioner Unleashed) or to render a comic-book mash-up with the kind of hokey gravitas it demands (the equally undervalued Ed Norton-starring Incredible Hulk). Here, however, Leterrier takes his first serious misstep. His set pieces are reasonably coherent, never splintering into the kind of cut-cut-cut visual diarrhea that has marred so many recent action flicks, but the dramatic material is woefully inert, and his crew's technical contributions vary in quality. Ramin Djawadi provides a rah-rah action score that works during the picture but that I am now hard pressed to remember, and Martin Laing's production design is both sumptuous and just cheesy enough to make you smile (especially the Argosian royal court, which from the thoroughly unoriginal looks of it, the king and queen are timesharing with every other ancient Greek movie ever made). Cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr.'s work, shadowy and handsome but always clear and crisp, is the one technical contribution of which I have little criticism, though Lindy Hemming's memorable costumes are strong as well. I wish I could say the same about the work of editors David Freeman and Vincent Tabaillon. One thing that made me happy about Clash before I saw it was that the film clocked in at a relatively conservative 118 minutes; after almost a decade of mostly plotless films that still commanded a 2 1/2 hour-plus running time, it was nice to find an action epic that knew its place and took up no more time than necessary. But Freeman and Tabaillon cut the picture with such a lack of urgency and drive that the two-hour Clash still feels like a three-hour butt-number.

You will notice that I have not yet discussed the performances in Clash of the Titans. My parents told me if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, but my Zombian duties force my hand. It's been a while since I've seen a major Hollywood film full of such distinctly colorless performances, and it's therefore fitting that the proceedings are anchored by Sam Worthington, who may be the least charismatic leading man to emerge on the scene in quite a few years. This is his third major action spectacle in the last year, after Terminator: Salvation and Avatar, and I am firmly convinced that he is only getting these roles because he lacks the sufficient onscreen presence to overshadow the tens of millions of dollars' worth of f/x that are the films' real raison d'etre. One thinks of what Perseus might have been with someone like Russell Crowe or Clive Owen, or even a proper B-movie action hunk like Jason Statham, in the role, and you just get depressed by what you're left with. Liam Neeson barks and glowers as Zeus, and he's engaging enough, but it's because Neeson is a great actor, not because it's a great role or a great performance. Fiennes brings a poignant Richard III quality to his villainy as Hades, and it's to his credit that he doesn't just channel Lord Voldemort here, but gives the ruler of the underworld his own insidious M.O. and insinuating style. Davalos makes next to no impression as the sacrificial lamb, and Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace), as fellow demigod Io, is so bland and unmemorable that we're now seven paragraphs into this review and this is the first time I've even felt the need to mention her. The best performance in the film is easily Pete Postlethwaite as Perseus's adoptive fisherman father, whose world-weary presence and matter-of-fact delivery nicely conveys the true plight of innocents in the hands of angry gods. Too bad he gets wiped out by special effects about ten minutes into the picture.

I am generally all for the idea of revisiting classic literature and mythology with the power of modern CGI effects technology; I think it's time that we finally get these great stories onscreen with all the visual panache and invention they deserve (I will give a big wet kiss to whatever filmmaker can give us a good, big-budget version of 1001 Arabian Nights). But knowing how to tell a great story is not a recent development. It predates cinema itself by thousands of years, and indeed the people of Argos would have been familiar with the techniques of effective drama. And thus, my guess is that if Perseus and his bunch had taken a look at Clash of the Titans, they would have been ready to throw Leterrier and his writers to the Kraken...like they should have done with Andromeda at the beginning of the movie. It would have saved me and many, many weekend moviegoers three hours (or was it only two?) of major boredom.

Note: I opted to attend a 2-D screening of this picture, as many of my fellow critics pointed out that the film, shot in standard 2-D format, was hastily converted to 3-D after the success of Avatar. It's a decision I do not at all regret. The film looks perfectly adequate in 2-D, contains no show-offy in-your-face shots that would demand 3-D treatment, and (most important of all given the quality of the film) I saved myself five bucks to boot.