Why Can’t they get Hades Right?

Hades-2

 

Is that the God of the Dead or Satan

I liked the Clash of the Titans remake, but not because it was a good movie. It was poorly written with mediocre acting. It couldn’t make up it’s mind if Zeus was a good god or an evil one, but not in a “gods are above good and evil” way. It was a cheesy overblown special effects romp. I could turn off the volume and blast metal in its place and nothing would be missed, but the biggest sin of the movie was the films villain, Hades.  Each god or goddess represented some element of life. They were above good and evil not because of their divinity, but because they specifically represented an element of the human experience. Hades as the god of the dead may have been disliked by the other gods, but that’s because they were immortal and they didn’t understand death. He was possibly the fairest of the gods. Death comes for everyone. If you were good you could be sent to the Elysian Fields essentially a heaven . If you were bad you went to Tartarus basically hell.  He could even be compassionate and allow people to come back to like if moved by heroes such as Herakles and Orpheus. Think of Him as a  very strict, by the book prison warden.  It really irks me when Hades is shoved into a Satanic role. TV Tropes even has a name for this: Everybody Hates Hades. The Clash of the Titans reboot turned Hades into a fallen angel cast into the darkness envying the heavenly realm of Olympus.  Disney’s Hercules made him essentially a demon bargaining for souls. Both Marvel and DC comics turn him into a villain who needs to be imprisoned in the underworld. A fair god of death is always a much more interesting character.

These films seem to lack fundamental understanding of the Greek myths. There are scores of monsters, evil humans, and gods who were actually wicked. The gods would sit back and watch the adventures unfold as a trial for humanity. Every now an then they would nudge things along to help the characters along. Filmmakers don’t need to manufacture Satan expys. Perseus’s enemy in the myth was an evil King named Polydectes who wanted to rape Perseus’s mother. The gods actually helped the young hero on his quest to save her. If they have to make a villainous god, its almost an outrage that they don’t use Hera the cruelest of the Olympians.But death is a scary concept so it therefor must be evil to tell a bland story.

 

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