The hero, Perseus, is called out of retirement to help his father Zeus (and eventually Hades, who is betrayed by Ares and then reconciled with Zeus) defeat a reawakened Kronos. But Wrath of the Titans-the 2012 sequel to the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans - centers on a plot by Hades and Ares to release the Titans in order to overthrow Zeus. The film that made “Titan” a household name, the 1981 Clash of the Titans, only engages superficially with the Titans: the monsters Medusa and the Kraken are called “the last of the Titans,” both destined to be defeated in separate clashes with the movie’s hero Perseus. It seems to me that this basic storyline, and the set of other plot elements that seem intrinsically associated with it, touch on a number of social/political anxieties in America today, as I’ll talk about in next month's column. And in almost every single one, the story is not the Titanomachy itself, but rather the reawakening or escape of the Titans from their prison, and the commencement or threat of a second war between Titans and Olympians. There are a number of treatments of the Titans in modern popular media.

The Titanomachy ends with a victory for Zeus and the Olympians, thanks to the strongarm help of the hundred-handed monster-children of Mother Earth, who imprison the Titans in Tartarus, the deepest part of the underworld. The hot blast surrounded the earthborn Titans, unspeakable fire approached the bright sky, and the gleaming bright light of the thunderbolt and lightning blinded their eyes, though they were strong. The land boiled, and every stream of Ocean, and the uncultivated sea. It takes up a full fifth of (what survives of) Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem about the birth of the gods (old-timey translation here), with a vivid description of the effects of Zeus’ prodigious use of the thunderbolt: This battle, the war of the Olympians against the Titans, is called the Titanomachy, and can be considered the first war of Greek myth. But his wife, Rhea, replaced baby Zeus with a rock and hid him on the island of Crete until he grew strong enough to force Kronos to regurgitate his siblings, whom he then led in battle against Kronos and kin. The king of the Titans, Kronos, came to power by castrating his father Ouranos and held onto that power - in view of a prophecy that his son would overthrow him - by swallowing each of his children at birth. In Greek myth, the Titans were the gods who ruled the cosmos in the generation before the ascent of the Olympians (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, and the like). Why has the Titanomachy been so fascinating a subject for movies, TV, and video games in recent years?

Battle of the titans movie