Director: Desmond Davis
Date Watched: 10-24-2024
Where: At home, on a Blu-ray I own
Rating: 9/10
People always say “they don’t make them like this any more,” but this is really a “they don’t make them like this” kind of movie, because they just don’t make movies like this anymore. There’s no other way to say it. From the moment the music kicks in over the opening credits to the final fanfare, this movie rocks.
Yes, the effects are old-fashioned, and while they still look really good in places (and pretty bad in others), I know modern CGI would look far, far more realistic. The problem is that in a modern film they’d make everything else bad alongside those believable effects, and end up with a worse final product. They wouldn’t film everything in the real world, with real people, and only pepper in CGI monsters as needed. Instead we’d end up with CGI everything, explosions galore, and the same mile-a-minute pacing that plagues every modern action film. For the same reason I prefer Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings movie to Peter Jackson’s bloated trilogy, I prefer films that utilize Ray Harryhausen’s effects to most of the sleek and modern CGI epics of today.
The heroes are heroic, the monsters menacing, and the gods, led by Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis, are appropriately fickle and jealous. The landscapes are sublime, the dungeons dank– everything in this film is fantastic. This film was probably the last gasp of the peplum genre, also known as the sword and sandals epics, which peaked in the ’50s and ’60s, and what a glorious send-off this is. Peplum didn’t die with a whimper, instead going out with a kraken-sized bang.
I wish I’d seen it when I was a kid, because it would have been super fun, but I’m glad I finally saw it now.
