Nostalgia can be a powerful drug. While under its influence, I could talk at length about how great the 1981 Clash of the Titans is. In reality, that’s a 10-year-old version of myself talking, wowed by monster battles, mechanical owls, and bickering Olympian gods. OK, so maybe the present-day version of myself is still enamored of all those aspects, particularly the legendary Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion swan song in the monster department. But that doesn’t change the fact that the original Clash isn’t really a very good movie, a revisionist take on Greek mythology that mainly serves as an excuse for lots of fun sword-and-sandal action set pieces. Given an understanding of that going in, and fueled by the rosy spectacles of nostalgia, there’s plenty to enjoy in that film.

Keeping that in mind, I went into director Louis Leterrier’s remake and sat the kid who nearly wore out a mid-1980s VHS copy of the original movie down next to me, prepared to have both of us look at this with unjaded eyes. But unlike the original, which made me him want to don a bedsheet toga, fashion a shield from a garbage can lid, and behead evil gorgons, this version was kind of a snooze for both of us.

Cast aside any attachments to the original that you might harbor. The two films are only related in that they both draw from the same Greek myth of Perseus. Leterrier even includes a thinly-veiled message aimed at anyone annoyed in the first half hour at his divergence from the familiar: As Perseus (Sam Worthington) and the soldiers of Argos are being outfitted for the dangerous journey to consult the Stygian witches on how to kill a beast that is being sent to destroy the city, he runs across a clockwork owl that looks exactly like the one that appears in the 1981 film. “Just leave it,” he’s told. That’s also Leterrier’s message to devotees of the original entering his movie: Just leave it.