Last night, after the household chores were done — well, as done as they were going to get for a Monday — I threw on one of my favorite movies, Jason and the Argonauts. If you don’t know it, this is one of those great old fantasy-adventure flicks based on mythology and featuring visual effects by the master of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen. I first saw it when I was very small, four or five maybe, and it made a tremendous impression on me. I’ll grant that it’s not a perfect film. The plot is pretty thin, existing mostly as a framework to get us from one to the next of Harryhausen’s set pieces. But what set pieces! Two of Harryhausen’s best-remembered and most celebrated are in this one film: the attack of the giant bronze man Talos — the grinding sound as he moves his metal body still gives me the creeps! — and a platoon of reanimated skeletons known as the Children of the Hydra. Both sequences look a little clunky these days (Talos less so than the skeletons, in my opinion, but that could be just because Talos freaked me out more as a youngling), but they are simply brilliant examples of a handcrafted and now virtually extinct artform. And they’re a helluva lot more charming than any of the photorealistic but dull CG critters we take for granted now.
Anyhow, as I was saying, Jason is a flawed movie, as much as I love it. I’ve thought for years that it had a very abrupt ending: Jason sees a couple of his companions killed by the Children of the Hydra and dives off a cliff to escape them himself, then we cut to Zeus and Hera watching all the action from Mt. Olympus, and they essentially say “Well, that was fun,” and the end credits roll. On last night’s viewing, however, I realized that not only is this ending unsatisfying, it’s also incomplete… it doesn’t conclude the story that was set up at the film’s beginning.
Jason and the Argonauts begins, as do so many fantasy films, with an evil warlord seizing a kingdom and executing the children of the king he’s overthrown, only to have one of them — Jason — escape his grasp. Jason returns 20 years later as a grown man, sworn to fulfill an ancient prophecy by killing the usurper, Pelias, and reclaiming his father’s throne. But first, in order to rally the people and restore his kingdom to its former glory, Jason embarks on a quest to find the fabled Golden Fleece, a magical gift from the gods that lies on the other side of the world. And of course he will find and win the Golden Fleece, because these sorts of heroes in these sorts of movies always do… but he never returns to deal with Pelias and take back the kingdom! Instead, as I mentioned, the movie just stops, with Jason and his newfound love Medea embracing on the boat while the gods watch with amusement. So what the hell happened to the whole motivation for the quest in first place?! Jason doesn’t abandon his pledge to retake the kingdom or anything like that. He hasn’t outgrown his thirst for vengeance. The movie just drops the matter entirely. Oh, Zeus says something to the effect of “Jason and Medea will have many adventures in the future,” which I suppose implies that he’s going to go back to Thessaly, but there is no actual resolution. In all the times I’ve watched Jason, I’ve never noticed that such a huge thread was left dangling. This film may be unique in that, too, since I can’t think of any other movie that leaves such a big plot point unresolved. Were Harryhausen and Charles Schneer, the producer of the movie, planning to do a sequel? Did they run out of time and/or money? Was the movie running long and the last 15 minutes got cut? I’m going to have to look into that question, because now that I’ve become aware of it, it’s going to bug me forever…
(By the way, if you’ve never seen this film, don’t allow my criticism to scare you away from it. It really is marvelously entertaining. It just happens to have one big flaw…)
