The hero of Louis Letterier’s “Clash of The Titans” remake is Perseus, a dullish amalgam of Prometheus, Holden Caulfield, and a gladiator outfitted by Party City. The infant demigod is adopted by a kindly fisherman and his family, who find him floating on the sea inside a coffin also packed with his dead mother. Over time, as will happen with humble, impoverished fishermen, he develops a nicely bronzed, buffed-out bod. The mind matches the muscle. Perseus does everything with burning, idiot intensity; Sam Worthington translates his furiously driven cyborg in “Terminator Salvation” into a sullen teenager. Instead of Sophocles’ “It is better never to have been born” we get the familiar refrain of the surly sixteen year old, “I didn’t ask to be born, Dad!” With this kind of teen angst, you wouldn’t want to ask Perseus to clean his room, let alone risk his wrath by slaughtering his family.

But Hades (Ralph Fiennes) angers him by doing just that, kicking off a firestorm of righteous anger at a bunch of gods who are apparently not too big to fail. The basic formula of Letterier ’s version is similar to the original. Prophecy, pouting; running away from fate straight into it; beat the beast, kiss the girl, fade to black. The story is a series of tasks in the Jason/Hercules mold, and the new version is no more consistent in its handling of the Greek myths it clumsily throws together than its 1981 predecessor.

The big difference is the man-versus-god wedge driven into the new story. The screenplay insists on the humanistic humanity of mortal man’s humanity in the brotherhood of humane mortals (p.s. gods be damned!). This is interesting because the human characters are written so poorly. Perseus is a cipher unless he’s in battle, when the ‘god’ in him takes over and the blank mask of his face roils into fiery bloodlust. Nothing like that happens around women; the god in him may come out to swing a sword but when he gets a woman alone he’s at sixes and sevens. Heaven forbid a fantasy film should encourage us to daydream about anything except new ways to shed blood.

If Perseus’ moody silences begin to seem more like a distracted Worthington fantasizing how he’s going to spend his paycheck, at least he gives off a vague impression of purpose. Everyone else seems thoroughly baffled. Io, the eternally young maiden who watches over him, is played by Gemma Arterton as a boring virgin princess half in love with him and half a kindly matron. Confusingly, she is aloof and goddessy in some scenes and weakly mortal in others. The gods, led by Liam Neeson as Zeus and Fiennes as Voldemort—I mean, Hades—are peevish and given to wanton cruelty, as expected, but never appear divinely powerful. They’re impotent rather than lusty, pagan, elemental.

The only good performance of the lot is Mads Mikkelson as Draco, the soldier who accompanies Perseus on his quest. Mikkelson never cracks a smile, and he’s such a good character actor that if his Draco can take this risible nonsense seriously, maybe you can, too. Ultimately he’s not enough, and the dullness of the mortals undercuts the point of their revolt. Who cares if they succeed in overthrowing the gods? Their vapid humanity isn’t worth saving.

The beauty of its special effects makes the contrast between visuals and story, brawn and brain, all the more maddening. The film looks like it took a village to make it, from the epic-sized cast to the behind-the-scenes army of wizards who clicked up its excellent digital effects (the version I saw was in 2D). Letterier’s mythical Greece feels well-crafted. Serious pains were taken to create a fictional world, people it, and bring it to life. It’s an impressive achievement.

Puzzling, then, that the film is so lacking in story and character. This isn’t to deplore yet another dumb spectacle churned out by Hollywood, a silly complaint that is beside the point. The disappointment here is that even a mediocre, standard-issue blockbuster script would have made this an outstanding film. Letterier and his writers seem to have purposely substituted crude stimulus-response sequences for a story.

The story was about all the original “Clash of the Titans” had going for it. The solid structure of the tale, however campy or thin it may have been in places, grounded the viewer in such a way as to make the unabashed cheesiness and midnight-movie special effects assets rather than liabilities. Harryhausen’s stop-motion wonders never enchanted because they were lifelike. They enchanted because they fit in so well with the film’s hilarious, over-the-top quest. They never outpaced the epic sweep of the plot.

How much better could this have been, then, had the old story simply been re-used, crowned with bleeding-edge effects? Letterier’s hollow update begs the question. It has the soul of a PowerMac, sleek and cold. The more realistic the creatures and locales, the more cheerless and mechanical the film becomes. The men and women in this new “Clash” battle to liberate themselves from the rule of the wicked gods, but they’re merely escaping into a new form of servitude—to machines. This is a grim new world controlled not by the whims of baleful gods but the manipulations of mice.