MIGHTY MINOTAUR
OTHER ‘TITANS,’
Minotaur
In a movie full of digital razzle-dazzle, the Minotaur might be the most special effect: It’s the one creature that uses no computergenerated imagery at all. Stuntman Spencer Wilding spent four hours a day for a week being fitted for a two-piece latex suit, horns and contact lenses to create a figure more humanoid than other on-screen Minotaurs over the years. “It’s a human that’s deformed,” Liebesman says, “so that’s what we were going for, instead of it literally being a man and there’s been a bull head sewn on top of his head.”
Kronos
In mythological art, Kronos usually is depicted as looking like a man. Not so much in Wrath, where the 1,500foot-tall lava creature is the one enemy who rivals the Kraken in terms of computer-generated terror. Perseus’ fiery granddad proved to be a technical challenge for the effects people: Kronos had more than 200 million digitally simulated particles of lava falling off him. “If you have something that created the world and rock and stuff, in my mind, lava creates that,” Liebesman says. “It makes sense that this guy could birth a planet with all the lava coming off him.”
Makhai
Moving toward their final battle, Perseus and his crew face off with a legion of Makhai, Kronos’ undead warriors with two torsos who attack in a whirling-dervish fashion. “They’re lost souls that have been glommed together in this torturous way, and they are forced to go on the battlefield and keep fighting in their afterlife,” Liebesman says. They do bleed, though — and when they do, it’s lava, which ties them in with Kronos. And they’re humanoid in design but also bipedal since the director thought having them have four legs would make them seem too much like animals. Giving them a pair of torsos, though, “felt very mythical. And having them back-to-back and spinning just seemed cool.”
Chimera
Liebesman focused on having this winged creature with a goat’s head, a lion’s head and a snake’s tail interact with the world so that it felt real — especially for those in 3-D theaters. He and visual-effects supervisor Nick Davis hatched a way to make this four-legged flamethrower seem believable: One head would spit fuel, while the other created fire. “We were just trying to figure out why there were two heads that were different. We came back to the questions a 5-yearold would ask. When the heads work together, it looks like a creature that has some kind of plan rather than a dumb beast running around just flaming everything.”
Cyclops
Perseus finds friends in the warrior queen Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) and Poseidon’s son Agenor (Toby Kebbell) but not a 30-foottall, one-eyed Cyclops that traps them in a forest. Liebesman picked normal dirty skin for the computer-generated giant, “which makes our lives hard, but if we succeed, it looks real.” Yet he had an issue with its fight against Perseus. Anything that big has to be really, really strong. “We originally had a much longer sequence, but in order to keep it believable that this thing doesn’t just destroy him, we had to cut it down to a much quicker sequence. If Perseus was on his own with this thing for much longer, I think it might have smashed him.”