Clash of the special effects

The remake of 'Clash of the Titans' highlights how top-of-the-range special effects are leaving today's filmgoers feeling more disengaged than ever before, writes JOHN BYRNE

SHADOWS PLAY across ornate pillars in a torch-lit chamber. A dull (barely perceptible) rattle is heard. The air is deathly still but pregnant with tension and dread. Out of the gloom, an arrow whizzes. And then . . . she appears. Crawling and slithering half-seen into the half-light. A crown of writhing serpents adorning a once beautiful head.

Yes, terrified children of the 1970s and 1980s, this is 1981's Clash of the Titans, and stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen's lifetime-of-trauma-inducing Medusa. Her gaze may not (quite) have turned us to stone, but the scars, nightmares and need for heavy medication remain.

Skip forward 29 years and we find ourselves returned once again to the Medusa's lair. Only this time the air is anything but still – with tension and dread likewise absent. It's Louis Leterrier's absurd, jaw-droppingly demented Clash of the Titansremake, and bellowing beefcake jock-warriors are leaping deafeningly about the screen in gratuitous slow-motion. And the Medusa herself? A shiny, lightning-paced, improbably gorgeous CGI bad-ass who doggedly refuses to be remotely scary. Even with 3D glasses on.

It’s easy to be reductive; to automatically and glibly celebrate the old (viewed through rose-tinted, 2D glasses) while damning the new. Easy to wax nostalgic about a time when the cinema of the fantastic, and cinema in general, produced gentle and charming entertainments that allowed stories and audiences to breathe.

But watch these two, loose adaptations of the Perseus legend back to back and the seismic shift from cinema as visual storytelling to cinema as pure, brutal spectacle is laid bare.

The original Clashwas something of a last hoorah for the Harryhausen era, with new technologies/aesthetics set to sweep the old/slow ways aside. Viewed today, it's hard not to read it as an elegiac, oddly melancholic work. It plods in parts – and it's far from Harryhausen's finest project – but the sedate, even pace helps generate an atmosphere that is confidential and inclusive. It invites the viewer in, whispering rather than roaring the tale in his or her ear.

Like most contemporary blockbusters, Clash 2010 has little interest in such intimate engagement. It holds shell-shocked viewers at arm’s length: not massaging or engaging the senses, just assaulting them with a relentless, bombastic barrage of “stuff”.

This is an irony of the CGI era. Cutting-edge technologies that made the impossible possible were supposed to herald more immersive cinematic environments, populated by more "believable" fantasy creatures. In reality, however, the brutal pacing and omnipresent CGI of contemporary thrill-stuffed spectacles can leave viewers feeling more disengaged than ever before – with the current fad for 3D adding a furtherdistancing layer.

Let's be fair. CGI software and technologies ultimately offer creators more powerful new tools. When these tools are used with discretion and skill the results can be startling and beautiful. Take the well-integrated, utterly convincing spaceships in Battlestar Galacticaand Serenity, for example. Or the thousands upon thousands of virtual warriors that fill the screen in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'sthrilling Battle of Helm's Deep.

Yet when it comes to the creation of engaging creatures – that feel substantial, like they're really there – CGI highlights are few and far between (although the seminal Jurassic ParkT-rex is a notable exception).

Readers unfortunate enough to have seen Spielberg re-jig/desecrate ETfor a special edition release will appreciate how ill-judged CGI can be. By attempting to make the creature's movements more fluid, and its face more animated, Spielberg destroyed the clunky, awkward and solid charm that made the creation so memorably "alien" in the first place.

Which brings us to a key point. The quest for greater "realism" in special effects is, when it comes to depictions of the fantastic, something of a fool's errand. At its most memorable ( The Wizard of Oz, The Thief of Baghdad) the fantastic artfully speaks to and engages the imagination. It concerns itself not with prosaic "realism", but with a deeper reality. Ray Harryhausen, first and foremost an artist, understood this instinctively – bemoaning the fact that the CGI process "creates creatures that are too realistic". Creatures that are missing "one vital element": namely, "a dream quality".

Stop-motion animation, though it may appear crude and “jerky” to contemporary, CGI-bedazzled eyes, had and has this “dream quality” in spades . . . as readers still haunted by Medusa’s gaze will no doubt acknowledge. In the hands of a master like Harryhausen it proved itself a perfect fit for fantasy: potently evoking a sense of the uncanny, and perfectly capturing the otherworldly essence of beings of the imagination. Beings whose movements are, as the great man himself said, “beyond anything we know”.