JCC Greek Mythology at the Movies

I was shocked, saddened, and completely blindsided to learn that The Legend of Hercules has 0% on Rottentomatoes. Usually those 300 ripoff/Greek Mythology-raping movies make it into the high teens at least.

 

Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans or GTHOTB.

Katya Jade

 

Yeah the Ray Harryhausen era, that was a golden age, never to return. RIP old man. That's one reason to watch the Oscars this year, to pay my respects during the grim reaper montage.

To me, Greek mythology will always look like classic stop-motion animation.

Jason and the Argonauts

 

Also, don't forget:



The new one doesn't look much better than that one, which may explain the 0%...

 

Let us never forget the unforgettable



Hercules in New York.

 

dp4m, It's a good point. Kevin Sorbo cannot be blamed entirely for setting the bar so incredibly low.

 

It was a guy whose classic atire (and behavior) resembles a stereotypical cave man more than anything. And idiot is being celebrated by idiots. Seems appropriate to me.

 

It's a strange thing. Everyone seems to agree that Greek Mythology is incredibly cinematic, otherwise these movies would not be getting made, yet everyone also apparently agrees that it is not cinematic enough, because radical alterations are always necessary. Maybe there is a fear that audiences cannot be surprised and entertained unless the title is some kind of bait and switch maneuver.

 

What?? Renny Harlin also directed Deep Blue Sea, the finest horror action movie about genetically engineered sharks ever made.

 

Well, I think part of the problem is that we have an outsized reverence for Classical civilization. That gives some of its images and available allusions huge cultural currency. But most people being predictably unfamiliar with the actual details of the stories they "like" there's a fair amount of revision required to make something that's genuinely appealing to them. You don't tend to see this dynamic as much when a more culturally native story is at issue, like all the hugely successful and relatively straight re-tellings of the Three Kingdoms Era exploits in China. It's easier to make work because they already bring a sensibility to the characters and themes that the audience has actually inherited, instead of the ones it merely wishes it had.

 

What are the best Three Kindgom movies? The only one I've seen is Red Cliff.

 

What What

 

The orignal Clash of the Titans is certainly much better than the piece of junk Louis Leterrier called a remake. Even the novelization (by Alan Dean Foster, no less) is pretty good.

Edit: Apparently COTT was set to have a sequel in the mid 80s focused on Aeneas, but it never went into production. Really, though, I don't see how the proposed "sequel" could have been called such unless Aeneas was meant to be a descendent of Perseus.

 

I don't know how many movies there actually are. But there are huge number of long-running television series and comic books and things that just seem to lay out the stories as they happened.

Well, "happened" I guess.

 

In general I grit my teeth every time I see a movie or tv show that tries to ape the look of 300 or the dark rainy bluish look of Underworld, or combine 300 and Underworld into a grungy hybrid comic-myth-horror "style". I'm looking at you, I, Frankenstein. Poor Aaron Eckhart, a talented actor relegated to the roles that not even Karl Urban or Paul Bettany will touch.

 

It's a good thing that one guy who praises movies everybody hates/hates movies everybody loves has been blacklisted by RT, so it has a chance of staying there.