The Clash of the Titans movies are racist

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I admit that when I saw Clash of the Titans with Sam Worthington a couple of years ago, I enjoyed it as a visceral sword-and-sandals action movie. However, I skipped this year's Wrath of the Titans after feeling a little burnt out on movies adapted from Greek history and mythology, but that's not what I'm going to complain about in this post. What currently upsets me about the Clash movies is how they cast Andromeda, Perseus's love interest. In both films they portrayed her as a Nordic-looking European woman, yet in the original Greek mythology she was from "Aethiopia", which is what the Greeks called the area we now know as Sudan. Last time I checked, Sudan is in tropical Africa. In fact the very word "Aethiopia" stems from a Greek word meaning "burnt faces" in reference to the Sudanese people's dark skin. In other words, the Clash of the Titans movies cast a European woman to play a dark-skinned African princess!

Of course this is far from the only creative liberty the Clash movies take with the mythological source material, but I find this one inexcusable because it reeks of racism. It's one thing to tweak a few details of the original mythology for the sake of drama, but there's no reason for Hollywood to replace a beautiful African woman into yet another generic white female lead. Were the filmmakers scared of showing Sam Worthington's Perseus in an interracial relationship with a black woman who wasn't lighter-skinned like Beyonce or Kerry Washington? If that's the case, so much for our post-racial 21st century!

There is reportedly another Clash sequel in production called Revenge of the Titans. I wish there was some way I could contact the filmmakers to inform them of Andromeda's true ethnicity so they can correct their past casting errors. Alternatively, the Clash franchise could be rebooted sometime in the future with a more accurate, African Andromeda. Either way, more people must know that Perseus's love interest was African!

BTW, I'm not black, I'm a white guy who is Nordic-looking.

Well ... perhaps ... but then again Africa wasn't all that simple. Egyptian depiction of foreigners:



The first one is identified as a Libyan.

<----- Wants BrandonSP to also remind Hollywood that the characters in the movie adaptations of Dragonball Z and The Last Airbender are supposed to be Asian, not white.

The "Aethiopians" would be represented by the second guy (the jet-black guy).

That's a Nubian so yeah ... except ... Egypt had colonies there and so its conceivable there were light skinned people in those places. Semitics, Libyans, etc. Egypt was a package deal ethnically, all the colours of the rainbow.

From the idiotic script of the first movie (I've never seen the second), I think it's more likely that the screen writers were more guilty of ignorance of the facts, rather than overt racism.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer