I have no idea why all of a sudden she is starring in two big CGI fantasy franchise flicks this year, when she wasn't even well known before, but her voice is the most snotty, condescending and annoying in a makes-you-want-to-smack-her-face-around-to-the-back-of-her-head way. And her role in both movies (Clash of Titans and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time) seems to include a large portion of the exposition in as grating and off-putting a way possible. Watching the Prince of Persia trailer on mute makes it look like a fun movie. Listening to the trailer which includes her voice practically non-stop as it moves jarringly from stuffy narration to smug and pissy "banter" that passes for witty dialogue in movies written by people who are counting on the visual effects cover the multitude of sins in their scripts.

In addition, she is playing the love interest in both films. I suppose she is entirely acceptable in that role in a visual sense, but as you mature, you start wanting more than just good looks out of the female characters in a film, because otherwise, they could just cast supermodels. In Clash of the Titans, Zeus, in order to 'reward' his son for her heroics in saving a city and foiling a usurpation of Zeus's leadership, brings Lady Infodump back to life. Hotness aside (and when you have Alexa Davolos playing a genuinely nice princess who owes you a solid for saving her city and her life and her reign, being given a chick who looks like Arterton is not as big a favor as it might seem on its own), there is the fact that Zeus seems to expect you to spend the rest of your (possibly immortal) with a woman who has been so long that she seems to find everything in the world boring. You would think ZEUS of all people would grasp the concept of "bros before hos" and understand that of all the recently dead a guy might possibly want to have resurrected, HIS MOTHER, HIS FATHER, HIS INNOCENT BABY SISTER, and the guys who followed him into HELL back, rather than an arrogant, jaded narrator who boasts of having resisted the sexual advances of a god (yeah, she's gonna be a LOT of fun in bed - so much for the shallow appeal).

As for the other film, I haven't seen it yet, but from the trailer, she appears to play that oh-so-typical love interest who condescending attitude and constant belittlement of the actual hero seem to be designed to appeal to some sort of "enlightened" post-chauvinist ideal. Is moving from male characters who demonstrate their affection by manhandling and bossing around their love interests to female characters who deride and belittle their love interests to show the audience how independant they are, really "progress"? I don't think so. I first saw the "If I was a woman in a fantasy novel" list on the internet almost ten years ago, so I kind of thought that sort of "romantic" by-play was considered trite by now. It comes across as even worse when the actress in question sounds so gratingly impressed with herself the whole time.

So is Gemma Arterton sleeping with someone in the industry or what?