Almost 30 years later, Hollywood turns its remake-thirsty gaze on the 1981 Ray Harryhausen classic Clash of the Titans. Does the Sam Worthington-starring remake live up to the original? How does Blake feel about the new version of one of his childhood favorites? The answer may surprise you.
2 in 1 Showcase At the Movies Episode 15: Clash of the Titans
(I know I’m talking in the third person here. I always do that when I write the podcast blurbs. Just click and listen.)
As you are probably aware, if you’ve spent any time on this blog, I’ve got a real fondness for mythology in general, Greek mythology in particular, and the adventures of Odysseus specifically. I do consider The Odyssey one of the finest adventure stories of all time, and the assorted interpretations of that book have entertained me to no end. It wasn’t a hard decision at all to give Zachary Mason’s book The Lost Books of the Odyssey a try.
The book labels itself as a novel, but it’s not really, not if you define define a novel as a book length work of fiction. Instead, Mason gives us a quick read full of 44 alternate takes on the tales found in the Illiad and the Odyssey. As the writer notes in the introduction, before the poet Homer’s interpretation of Odysseus’s story became the standard, there were many versions of the story that were used, moved around, and toyed with by storytellers putting their own stamp on the legend.
This book purports to be some of those “lost” tales, and several of them feel as though they actually could be. “Helen’s Image” shows the woman who launched a thousand ships making a different choice, for example, and in “A Sad Revelation” we see an Odysseus whose wife Penelope has not been as loyal as in the classic version. Some of the other tales, “The Books of Winter” for example, take the framework of Odysseus’s tale and wrap it around a context that would not have been thought of in Homer’s time. More than one of the tales dips its toes into the realm of metafiction, making a commentary on fiction itself. “Record of a Game” reinvents both Homeric tales as document about the playing of one of the oldest games of strategy.
If you’re trying to accept this book as an actual “lost” tale of Odysseus, it’s not going to satisfy you, but as an alternate take, it works marvelously well. The stories come across like Odysseus told through the prism of the Twilight Zone or Marvel Comics’ What If? series — versions of Odysseus that branch off from or exist catercorner to the version that we’re all so familiar with. I greatly enjoyed this book. It really engaged me, charged up my imagination, and got me to look at Odysseus’s world from a different angle. I definitely recommend this one.
Last week, I reviewed books two through four of Rick Riordan‘s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, all of which I enjoyed immensely. Later that same day, I got the fifth and final book in the series, The Last Olympian. I finished it the next morning. It’s been a long time since I read any novel that fast, a long time since I was up until the small hours because I couldn’t put the book down… a long time since any book deserved that kind of devotion from me. But this book, and this series, deserved every minute I devoted to it and more.
Things have gotten really bad at Camp Half-Blood. The evil Titan Kronos has managed to inhabit a corporeal body again, and is recruiting an army of Titans, Demigods, monsters, and even minor gods who have felt spurned by Olympus. Percy’s friend Nico has come up with a plan that may give him an edge against Kronos, but it’s a risky one — one that has led to the downfall of everyone who has ever tried it in the past. But will it be worth the trying if it’s the only way to save the world?
Jackson really nails this last adventure. First of all, he breaks his own formula for this book. The previous books in this series have all followed the same pattern: incident, journey to Camp Half-Blood, Quest. This book starts the same, but the quest is rather a short one. About a quarter of the way into the book we begin a battle sequence that lasts until the climax. It’s a long battle, to be sure, one that takes several days, but the bulk of this book is concerned with a single battle. What’s more, it’s one of the most fantastic battles I’ve ever read in contemporary fantasy. The setting works, the monsters, the warriors, the bloodshed — all of it feels authentic, organic, and real.
The way the series ends, also, is spot-on perfect. Every character is true to himself (or herself) and things come together in a way that’s not entirely expected, but doesn’t surprise because it makes sense. However, the book is a bit open-ended. If this is the last word ever written about the world of Percy Jackson, it’s a good capper. All of the major characters are accounted for and the major plot threads tied up. But, unlike the look into the future that ended the Harry Potter series, we don’t really get a glimpse of the characters’ futures. Each of the main characters who survives is given a role, a purpose, that could easily be extrapolated to a life story, but there’s still room there. In fact, at the very end Riordan gives us a hint of another great adventure that may or may not be told, and the afterward even refers to this as the end of the “first Camp Half-Blood series,” implying that there will be more.
I certainly hope there will. There’s room for more grand adventures, either with Percy or some other Half-Blood entirely, in this wonderful fantasy universe. I’m kind of glad I didn’t start reading this books until the last volume was already released. I got through the whole series in less than a month and had a wonderfully satisfying reading experience without the frustration of waiting a year in-between installments. But if Riordan gives us more, I’ll be in on the ground floor for the next series.
I’ve mentioned it here before but it bears repeating: I really love Greek Mythology. As you guys have already seen in detail here on the site. But a couple of months ago, one of my fellow teachers recommended this book to me, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. The premise sounded intriguing and I always like new series fiction — especially if the series in question is finished and I don’t have to worry (not to sound crass) about the author dying and never finishing. So upon my friend’s recommendation, I picked the book up and cracked it open, finishing just earlier today.
The Lightning Thief is the first volume in a five-book series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Percy is a sixth-grade student who has spent his life bouncing from one boarding school to another, none of them able to handle a genuinely good kid who nonetheless constantly seems to find himself in trouble. This year, that trouble starts getting worse — as in the “monsters and mayhem” kind of trouble instead of just flunking an English test. One of the nastiest encounters leads him to a strange summer camp full of other kids just as extraordinary as he himself is, and Percy finds the truth: the gods of Greek myth are real, are alive, and one of them is his long-lost father.
I didn’t really pay attention to this book when it was released, shelving it mentally with the dozens of Harry Potter clones that were being put on shelves at the time. Having read it, I still think I was partially correct in that assessment. Structurally, this first book is very similar to Harry Potter — Percy has two friends who accompany him, the mentor characters are suitably mysterious, and the school setting is swapped for a summer camp. However, the more I think of it, none of those elements Percy and Harry have in common were really originated by Harry anyway. There are a lot of elements that Percy has unique to himself, and that’s what makes this book easy to recommend. Riordan has a really interesting social structure in place here, with the gods capable of playing both ally and antagonist as the situation demands. He uses the classic Greek deities, monsters, and symbology to great effect here, crafting a story that is singularly exciting. Percy is quite different from Harry in personality, carrying a bit of a god’s temper in him. As for his friends — well, Annabeth does seem to have a dash of Hermione, but considering who her sire is, that’s only natural.
On a personal note, I have to admit reading this book startled me, because Riordan actually overlaps once or twice with things I have done (or was planning to do) with my own work-in-progress Summer Love, but as both stories employ Greek myths, that’s really unavoidable. My story is drastically different from Riordan‘s, as is my interpretation of the Olympians. It was a little hard, still, to divorce my own ideas from what I read here.
Once I was able to do that, though, I really did enjoy this book. It’s a very strong beginning to the series, and I intend to hunt down book two, The Sea of Monsters, ASAP.
BONUS REVIEW:
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m a member of the Amazon.com Vine Program, which gives me a chance to read and review books before they are released. I just finished a really great mystery novel by Lyndsay Faye entitled Dust and Shadow, about Sherlock Holmes and his effort to capture Jack the Ripper. If you’re interested in my review, you can read it here: Dust and Shadow review.
Actually, I guess this could also fit under the “What I’m Reading” category and, if I had one, “What I’m Teaching.” I’ve been presenting The Odyssey to my ninth-grade students for three years now, but this is the first time I’ve presented the 1997 miniseries to the class, and in fact, the first time I’ve watched it myself. All in all, it’s not bad.
This Hallmark-produced miniseries, of course, casts Armand Assante as the great Odysseus, my personal favorite of all the Greek heroes (as people who’ve read Summer Love have no doubt surmised). After ten years of war in the city of Troy, Odysseus makes the mistake of offending Poseidon, god of the seas, and is forced to wander for years on his quest to return home.
Considering this was made for television, the cast is pretty impressive. Bernadette Peters does a great turn as Circe, and Isabella Rossellini‘s interpretation of Athena is particularly strong. Of the immortal cast, only Vanessa Williams‘ Calypso is rather weak. Her delivery leaves something to be desired, with stunted lines that sound like she’s reading off the page. She’s definitely improved as an actress since this movie was made.
The human cast, though, helps make this movie work. Assante‘s Odysseus is great, with just the right mixture of wisdom and arrogance to get him in and out of trouble. Alan Stenson as his son, Telemachus, isn’t bad. Greta Scacchi as Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is wonderful. She really nails a wide range of emotion going from despair to hope to love to cold rage. She’s a wonderful part of the cast. To my surprise, though, I was really impressed by Eric Roberts as Eurymachus, one of the boorish suitors that attempts to woo Penelope in Odysseus’s absence. Even though most of Odysseus’s woes are due to the machinations of Poseidon, the god only appears twice, and as a form in the crashing waves. Roberts is more human, more active, and really comes across as the main antagonist of the miniseries.
As an adaptation, it’s adequate. There are a few things that are left out that I wish had been included — specifically the slaying of the cattle of the sun god Helios. If you’re going to get rid of that event, which is the cause of Odysseus’ men dying in the poem, the filmmakers found an okay way to replace it. The real problem, though, is that it loses the aspect of the sailors’ deaths being their own fault. Instead of being punished, they’re basically bystanders who get killed to pay for Odysseus’s original mistake. It lessens the moral of the story, as it relates to the Greek rules of hospitality.
Other changes are easier to live with. The story of Argus, for example, is one of the best parts of the poem, but I can understand how it would be difficult to translate a parable about the loyalty of an ancient dog to the television screen. I cannot, though, forgive the fact that they omit the Sirens — one of the most dynamic and altogether filmable segments of the poem.
As a filmgoer, it’s just okay. As a teacher, I can totally recommend it to anyone presenting The Odyssey to a high school audience. It tells the basic story well, as long as you’re ready to bridge the gaps and correct some of the changes to the timeline. Plus, the fight scene at the end is really good and guaranteed to get the attention of a teenage audience raised on movies that make the first Halloween look like The Mickey Mouse Club in comparison. (Don’t worry, it’s not that gory. Just gory enough.)
Some say superhero comic books are the “modern mythology.” I say, what’s wrong with the classic stuff? This week in Everything But Imaginary, I look at modern heroes and ancient myths.
Everything But Imaginary #308: Not-So-Modern Mythology
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