Paramount
Was Hercules truly a god? Was he just a mortal man? Was he, as Disney posited, flanked at all times by a chorus of R&B singers and a grumpy man-goat?
The world may never know. Even if the world does kind of know, because Hercules was not a real person and just some guy the Greeks made up who could lift really, really heavy things. But Brett Ratner’s Hercules isn’t satisfied with this answer. Instead, it offers up its own. This Hercules is something different, something billed as a “revisionist take on the classic myth,” where Hercules was not the son of Zeus and lived in a totally realistic Greece devoid of any supernatural beasts.
Which makes it super awkward when the first trailer for Hercules rolls out supernatural beast after supernatural beast for Dwayne Johnson to beat with a club. Technically, this Herc might still be a non-godly one – the text cards proclaim, “BEFORE HE WAS A LEGEND… HE WAS A MAN,” and Ian McShane spends most of the trailer bellowing other, similar things about man and legend. But it seems somewhere along the line Ratner decided against “revisionist real-world Hercules,” and opted for “revisionist does-all-the-same-things-old-Hercules-did” Hercules.
But if you like the idea of Dwayne Johnson fighting a series of mythical CGI beasties and were disappointed that Kellan Lutz’s Herc (in this year’s other take on the hero, The Legend of Hercules) looked like a regular (if well-muscled) man and not an impossibly huge slab of meat that was once human, then Hercules will be right up your alley. Watch the trailer below.
Hercules opens on July 25th.
Related Topics: Dwayne Johnson
