A 2010 remake, and a birth the notes tell twice

Greek and Roman myth, the notes write, turns up easily in films and other works — Heracles, Aphrodite, Zeus among the names they list — and is taken up again by later writers and artists. The 2010 Clash of the Titans, they say, is a remake of the 1981 film they title The Fall of the Titan Race, directed by Louis Leterrier. Its motif is a war between Zeus (Liam Neeson), called king of the gods, and Hades (Ralph Fiennes), god of the underworld. Perseus (Sam Worthington), born between god and human, walks the path that is to end it.

As they first tell the birth: Zeus assaulted the wife of King Acrisius, who hated Zeus and the gods, and Perseus was born of that. Later they also name Danae as his mother. Both are kept as the notes write them. Cepheus, “king of Argos” as they say, comes to challenge the gods, and Perseus falls naturally into the trouble.

A sea monster, Medusa’s head, and a life the film does not tell in full

The conflict, they write, begins when Hades threatens to send a sea monster to destroy a city unless a princess is sacrificed. Perseus goes into the underworld, where the living may not enter, meets Medusa, takes her head, and faces the monster. The film, they say, stays with that slaying and with a human will set against the gods; it does not follow the mythic life as a whole, and so the reading differs a little from the source.

In the myth as they tell it, Perseus is a figure of courage and character. A grandfather who feared a prophecy shut his daughter and grandson away and set them adrift on the river; later, in a contest, he died by a discus, and the prophecy was fulfilled. The gods gave a shield, winged sandals, and a helmet that hides, and with those Perseus found Medusa and kept out of danger. He saved Andromeda. Unlike other figures they have in mind, they write, he held no lasting grudge against the grandfather.

Botticelli’s Venus, and Aphrodite under another name

Beside the film they set Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a representative work of the fifteenth-century Renaissance, Venus rising from the sea. In the interpretation they follow, the nude is shaped as purity and truth of soul. The wind gods at the left can be read as angels, and the season goddess who moves to dress her as a baptism, a being born anew in the god. The painting, they write, carried the sense that sacred beauty and love can stand as one.

The goddess of love and beauty, called Venus at Rome, is Aphrodite in Greece, and is counted among the twelve Olympians. She holds, they write, both the fickleness of love and its desire, and is sometimes drawn as capricious, even harsh toward those who profane a sacred love or go against the order of nature. Myth, they conclude, keeps being rewritten in film and in painting, and Western art is a rich store of its signs.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of the 2010 Clash of the Titans beside Botticelli’s Birth of Venus: Louis Leterrier’s remake of a 1981 film they title The Fall of the Titan Race, Perseus as they first tell his birth and later name Danae, and a Renaissance nude read as purity of soul.

Last updated: 15 November 2026