Headscratchers / Wrath of the Titans

• Zeus kept talking about how gods were losing power without man's prayer. In the climax, he and Hades are among hundreds of troops. Why didn't anyone bother to pray to the both of them so they would be more powerful as they fought Kronos? It would've probably have helped prevent Zeus's death. Then again, if I were him, I'd want to get the hell out of this movie franchise too...
  • The soldiers are only about hundreds to a thousand, it's nothing compared to 6 billion population of the world, even if they prayed they'd only give Zeus one extra spark of bolt. And besides, soldiers praying in a battlefield with a volcano giant rampaging? That's just dumb.
    • I understand what you're getting at, but I guess my bigger problem is that they never establish just how much power a god can get from any given number of people. If you're saying that only a thousand men praying wouldn't make much of a difference, that's perfectly acceptable, but they never say that in the film. Plus, you don't have to stop what you're doing to pray—the soldiers could have prayed as they fought, unless there's some special rules involved with praying in their culture, which, again, was never established. The film just leaves so many things to be guessed at.
    • If they didn't need to stop fighting to pray, who's to say many of them weren't actually praying during the battle? Maybe without them Zeus and Hades wouldn't have survived so long.
    • There weren't anywhere near six billion people around in the era when the films were set, and the vast majority of the world's population at the time worshiped other pantheons and had no clue who Zeus was. Several hundred soldiers praying at once probably should have been enough to make a difference.
    • The real reason is that the filmmakers knew it would've contradicted the pro-atheism overtones they're trying to convey.
• Why is Andromeda blonde in the sequel? Did they have hair dye back then? Honestly, getting a new actress makes sense but having her be blonde but still the same character from the previous movie is really confusing.
  • Why is she even white in the first place? In the original myth, she was from freaking Ethiopia (which in case you didn't know is in sub-Saharan Africa)!
    • Ethiopia, the real-world modern country, is indeed in sub-Saharan Africa, but the mythological kingdom of Ethiopia, home of Andromeda, didn't have a clear location. Some classical myths placed it in North Africa, others in modern Israel, and artistic representations of Andie through the centuries have depicted her as white.
    • The claim that Aethiopia was located in modern day Israel emerged in the 1st century BCE. Earlier accounts all agree Aethiopia was just to the South of Kush. The claim that Aethiopia was in Israel was a product of the Jappa tourism industry, much like the claim that Jappa was where the Biblical story of Jonah occurred. Given that Arthiopian literally means dark skinned Andromeda should really either be African, Arabic, or Indian.
    • The term Aethiopia, as a generic or ethnic designation, comprises the people who dwelt above the equator, between the Atlantic ocean and the Indian ocean; the term Aethiopian refer to all the "sun-burnt" races, so designated from their being of a darker hue than their immediate Hellenic neighbours. The word Aithiops is derived from the two Greek words, from αἴθω + ὤψ (aitho “I burn” + ops “face”); translating as Burnt-face in noun form and red-brown in adjectival form, as a reference to the light-to-dark red-brown skin tones of the North Africans, Middle Easterners and Indians. The ancient Greeks called Persians, Romans, Phoenicians, Scythians, Egyptians – all barbarians. They weren't fond of foreigners, so it's unlikely that the woman who (in one account) helped found Mycenae was a foreigner as Palestine had been a region where Greeks had settled. Moreover, the idea of Andromeda as a Princess living in Aethiopia only began after the Greeks had been inhabiting the Near Eastern region.
    • Ancient myths outright state that she was white. In Heliodorus’ tale the “Aethiopica” a white-skinned girl is born despite having black parents; to make a really long story short it’s revealed at the end of the tale that the girl was born white because her mother had gazed upon the image of Andromeda while she was pregnant. A single black spot on the girl’s elbow confirms the story. In Philostratus’ Imagines, Andromeda is described as “The maiden is charming in that she is fair of skin though in Aethiopia, and charming is the very beauty of her form; she would surpass a Lydian girl in daintiness, an Attic girl in stateliness, a Spartan in sturdiness.” Philostratus later mentions that the inhabitants of Aethiopia had ’strange coloring'. Ovid in his Metamorphosis mentions that Perseus initially mistook her for a marble statue until he realized that it was actually a young woman. Manilius in his Poetica Astronomica describes Andromeda as ‘nivea cervice’ meaning white-throated.
• So Perseus claims that he didn't want to leave his son behind when Zeus came to him asking for help to bargain with Hades in the Underworld. Okay, I get that but...Zeus is the most knowledgeable deity in the world. Couldn't Perseus just have asked Zeus to hide his son in a secret place that no one knows about while he went with them to Tartarus? Even without all of his powers, Zeus would have found a place to hide the boy that would keep him safe.
• How in blue blazes did Ares figure out that Helius made the wooden dagger and then deduce who Helius was and where he'd be in the village amidst all the chaos at the climax of the film? The Willing Suspension of Disbelief pretty much shattered for me at that point.
  • In the beginning of the film, Ares mocked Perseus for going fishing while the world is in danger, so Ares probably knows a considerable information about Perseus life, the wooden dagger only gives him the idea to bring Helius to watch Persus death, it's still a mystery how come he knows where Helius is though.
  • How did he know? Ares is a god after all, and gods are often attributed with senses and abilities beyond the mortal kin.
  • Even if it was wooden, Helius's toy dagger was still a toy dagger. Ares may well be sufficiently attuned to weaponry of all sorts to intuit something about its owner upon examination.
• How did Io die? I thought she was a demi-god. She should have lived as long as Perseus, unless Zeus brought her back as a human woman and just didn't say that at the end of the first film. But that still doesn't excuse them from not explaining how or why she died even if she were human.
  • Likely she came down with a fatal case of They Couldn't Get Gemma Arterton Back For The Sequel.
  • Demigods are mortal. Maybe she was killed or had an accident.
• In the end of Wrath, Perseus seems to kill Cronos with the Spear of Atrium. If Cronos indeed died with it, you gotta wonder, why did Zeus, Poseidon and Hades not kill him with it when, you know, he was imprisoned? And in that very fight, if Cronos' shockwave punches was so powerful as to get Zeus near-killed in two hits, why didn't he, you know, lead with that?
  • An in-story reason might be the gods did not trust each other enough to give up their personal weapons or wanted Cronos to suffer. The real reason like many of the plot holes in the remake and its sequal is Plot Induced Stupidity (that or to keep up the pro-atheism subtext).
  • Cronos's original defeat would've happened before Hephaestus was even born, let alone had gotten around to crafting power-enhancing weapons like the Spear. Presumably the job of confining Cronos was originally performed by all three brother-gods together - possibly with some help from Rhea, Hera and Demeter - and finding an alternative to constant guard duty would've been an early priority for all three. Which would've made building a proper prison for his grandpa Hephaestus's first commission from Daddy Zeus, even before the Spear.
    • Perseus actually mentions that The Spear was used to beat the Titans, so Hephaestus was around, they probably fast tracked the mythology to make it fit, also, Hades worries in the climax, that he and Zeus have no weapons, implying that the Gods put most of their original power into the weapons. As for why they didn't use the Spear to Kill Kronos, when talking about the Spear, Perseus said it was used to beat the Titans, plural, and from the ending, it seems that whatever Perseus did, it destroyed the spear, so perhaps the whole "titan killer" aspect wasn't something they wanted to use and risk destroying the weapon.
• It's understandable that humans would lose interest in praying to deities that had long track-records of being complete dicks to mortals, particularly after Perseus demonstrated how someone who rejects their worship can still kick Kraken ass. But why would those divine figures that didn't have such a bad relationship with mortals, like most of the goddesses or the umpteen-million petty household and nature deities, die out as well? What did the likes of Hermes or Demeter ever do to alienate humanity?
  • It was just a poorly thought out idea. How did the Titans survive without mortals to worship them? How did the gods win the war without mortal prayers to strengthen them? If Athena in a fit of pique could create Medusa and its head defeat the Kraken why were the Titans and gods scared of it? Why did the Olympians not create new worshippers or build it into humans that humans had to worship them? Why are mortals rebelling against the gods and not their own rulers who come across as dicks as well?
    • Most likely a decision on the part of the filmmakers that can be summed up in three words; Pro-atheism agenda.
    • In-Universe, The whole God Needs Prayer Badly thing might have been because of the Titanomachy, they expended most of their power fighting the Titans, while what was left made them, well, Gods, it was nowhere near the level they used to have, so they created humanity to act as living divine battery chargers, but the act tied them symbiotically to humanity, causing them to become dependant of on humans worship.

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