Clash of the Titans as a Parallel Remake

Abstract

REINTERPRETING MYTH AND FILM: CLASH OF THE TITANS AS A PARALLEL REMAKE AbstractLouis Leterrier's film Clash of the Titans (2010) is a new version of both Desmond Davis's 1981 film by the same title and the Greek myth of Perseus. Categorizing Leterrier's work is nevertheless problematic because the film partly defies many definitions of cinematic remakes elaborated by the critics in the past decades. Clash of the Titans shall be examined and evaluated in relation to both its precursor texts, with specific attention to its significantly different treatment of their narrative units. Although remakes have been produced since the very creation of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century and proliferate nowadays (Forrester 89), critics consider them as "an underexplored subject" (Forrester and Koos 26), whose definition(s) and classification(s) are still being scrutinized and debated. Remakes are often examined in terms of their fidelity to the primary...