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Ray Harryhausen, Hollywood's master of the stop-action miniature epic,
has not used the legend as the basis for any of his movies. Sinbad (several
times), Jason, Gulliver, even Perseus - he of the Gorgon Medusa - but
not Theseus.
The only two movie versions of the legend appear to be an Italian muscle
epic of the early 60s, Teseo contra il minotauro, featuring the
former Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathais in
the title role ('Teseo' not 'minotauro') and a mid 90s version of the
legend in which Kevin Sorbo's Hercules somehow gets to do the Theseus
thing (Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur). Neither plumb any
heights of artistic achievement. Neither are worth the price of admission
- no matter how low that may be.
Harryhausen's spiritual successor, Jim Henson, the muppeteer, had a go
at the Theseus legend. In his 1990 UK television Storyteller
series, Henson retold the Theseus legend, narrated by Michael Gambon who
appeared to be trapped in the Knossos Labyrinth.
Henson is also responsible for the eponymous labyrinth movie which has
its own site
or can be accessed on the Internet Movie
Database.
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Labyrinth
This fascinating movie combined the talents of Jim Henson with those
of ex-Pythoner Terry Jones. Depicting a surreal journey through a maze
by a teenage girl, it works on two levels.
In essence, it is a kid's adventure as the heroine tries to fulfil her
quest to journey to the Goblin City in order to rescue her baby half-brother.
She has to meet and overcome an increasingly bizarre series of obstacles
placed in her way by her nemesis, the Goblin King. But the movie works
at an adult level as well, marking a rite of passage for the girl and
her acceptance of her responsibilities in a blended family. Additionally,
many of the words plays and incidents contain referents that would be
beyond the ken of the younger viewers.
Like Alice's magical adventures, there are lots of off-beat characters
whom she meets and some mordant commentary on the nature of things, both
in the real world and in the world of fantasy. For example, when the heroine
applies the sort of reasoning power expected of her, in marking her route
on paving stones to ensure that she does not retrace the same path, the
Goblin King's minions rotate the marked stones so that her "Ariadne
string" will not work.
I also like the Escher-like chase scene at the climax. The Goblin King's
lair becomes a nightmare as the staircases precess in all directions,
creating a maximally vertiginous feeling for the heroine (and for the
viewer). The lair thus becomes a labyrinth itself, centred in the middle
of the main labyrinth through which the heroine has come to achieve her
quest.
Labyrinth remains one of the few fantasy movies of the 80s or
90s actually to succeed both as film and as fantasy. (The others, to which
I might refer in later articles, include Field of Dreams and The
Princess Bride.) If you rejected Labyrinth earlier as a "kid's
movie", it might be time to reconsider that rejection.
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Titanic
The opening shots of Titanic take us, via a remote camera, through
the labyrinth that is the corridors of the sunken ship. In the climactic
moments, the viewer is again taken through the maze as the camera follows
the flight to safety of the below-decks passengers and then the attempted
escape of the lovers. The movie is most interesting during the labyrinth
scenes and is a little tedious in between.
Yet it has made more money than any other movie and garnered as many
Oscars as Ben Hur. The question is, I suppose, not whether this
is a good movie but whether it is as great as those statistics would suggest.
By the time we saw it in Australia it was already past the early it's-going-to-be-another-Waterworld
and had chalked up amazing grosses in the US. However, in those early
days of release, there was no suggestion that it was overwhelmingly anyone's
choice as the best movie of 1997, nor that it would continue to sell so
many seats that it would pass a billion US dollars in world-wide gross.
The central problem with Titanic is the weakness of the script.
Amazingly, for a movie that went on to win the best picture Oscar, the writers'
branch of the Academy did not find the script among the ten best of the
year. With good reason. The first half exists dramatically in order to
get the audience to empathise with the characters during their ordeal
in the second half, so their plight will provide the appropriate catharsis
through the emotions of pity and fear. Yet the characters remain curiously
aloof and hard to grasp.
Oddly, for a movie with an "epic" sweep, Titanic does
not range over the support cast in any detail nor provide the depth required.
What, for example, is the story of the old couple who meet their fate
together in their bed? Who was the baker swigging his liquor on the stern
as the ship broke in twain, and what became of him? Why was the Astor
ready to die? Most sadly, I was left without enough fleshing out of the
ship's designer and his opposite number, the company director. And the
members of the crew all remained enigmas. The only character to emerge
in any memorable detail is the eponymous one.
In dealing with individual tragedies and dramas connected with the disaster,
A Night to Remember does it better. In terms of acting, only Kate
Winslet and Kathy Bates provide interesting performances and, even then,
the younger actress is left without enough to do with her role.
The recreation of the disaster is breath-taking. James Cameron again
shows that he is at home with that size of spectacle. (Although I confess
to a preference for the scale and drama of Abyss - at least in
the revised Director's cut.) But is spectacle enough? Is the bing and
the bang and the boom sufficient to paper over the problems created by
the inadequate inter-personal dramas being played out at the front of
stage.
Obviously a fair number of movie goers believe so. They have flocked
to the movie in great numbers. Those numbers would seem to be the proximate
cause of the decision to honour the film with the big Oscars. But popularity
is not enough. If it were, Ben Ean Moselle would have won countless wine
shows and Tom Clancy the Nobel Prize for literature. In a few years time,
Titanic will join that list of Oscar winners regarded as ephemeral,
ones whose surface glitz temporarily dazzled the Academy - movies like
The Greatest Show on Earth.
This most recent labyrinth movie is a good one - but it does not earn
greatness. Nor, like a number of other movies so honoured, did it deserve
a number of the Oscars it won - including Best
Picture.
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[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists
and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet
Movie Database (IMDb). I am not going to provide a link for each movie
mentioned.]
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