Who Wants to Live Forever? An Immortals Review (may contain spoilers)

Boys keep swingin'.

A while back, film critic Mark Kermode wrote an article for The Guardian - well, I say article, it was really an extended extract from the chapter of his latest book The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex (which I recommend by the way - end shameless plug) - about how blockbusters, due to their formulaic nature, could in fact have the most potential to be experimental in all of film. After all, if a summer blockbuster is advertised well enough or heavily enough, then people will turn up in their millions to watch it, regardless of whether they like it or not, or the subject matter. They think "Oh, that looks good/interesting/like a good way to stave off suicide for a few hours" and turn up. Last year we had Inception, a film set largely within the minds and dreams of its protagonists, and this year gave us Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which focused the action on a non-human main character and was told mostly without dialogue. Both of these films sound like the sort of thing you'd see in arthouse cinemas, and yet both grossed over $300,000,000 each.

So if there's a possible new fertile ground for experimentation, the blockbuster could well be that. Granted, we live in a world where films like Zookeeper and Jack & Jill exist, so we'll still have to wade through the crap to get to the gold, but with today's film Immortals, released on the same day as Jack & Jill and will hopefully crush it like a bug at the box office, we see a film that tries a different stylistic approach to blockbusters. And while that works, the film itself is...oh, how do I put it? Um...

Now, when I say stupid, I don't mean that in a bad way necessarily. Commando is stupid. Crank is stupid. Warrior King/Tom-Yum-Goong is stupid. And I enjoy all of those films because they take their stupidity in stride and pull out some amazing set pieces. Warrior King's famous one-shot fight scene, for instance, or Arnold Schwarzenegger acting as a one-man army corps in the climactic action scene of Commando. Immortals, however, isn't that glorious. Oh it's glorious to look at, but its pacing is so slow, the characters so blank, and the plot so nonsensical and, well, stupid, all it really offers in the world of macho action films is a pretty face. Just a shame that it plays things completely straight-faced and serious.


The plot cribs from Greek mythology and, like its predecessors 300 and Clash of the Titans, it wears these references so loosely they might as well be down its ankles. Taking inspiration from the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, as well as the Titanomachy, Immortals tells us, through the rich baritone of John Hurt, of "a war in heaven" between two opposing clans - one bedecked in gold and consisting almost entirely of swimsuit models, and the other an army of bestial stone-skinned warriors, who appear to be about 5'10" at most. The golden boys and girls won, and declared themselves Gods, the undisputed rulers of Mount Olympus, and imprisoned the losers, now called Titans, deep within Mount Tartarus. Years passed, and now King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) plans on releasing his Titan brethren with the aid of the Epirus Bow, a weapon forged by Ares (Daniel Sharman), to reclaim Olympus. Since the gods cannot intervene, Zeus (Luke Evans/John Hurt) chooses a champion to lead the armies of man against Hyperion: Theseus (Henry Cavill).

Almost immediately this film proves itself more mythologically accurate than last year's godawful Clash of the Titans by actually including Titans - OK, they're mostly Spartans with grey skin and who growl a lot, but we have Hyperion there. Theseus does in fact fight a Minotaur in a labyrinth (of sorts), and it sticks with Greek mythology rather than throwing in Norse or Scandinavian beasties. I can forgive dalliance with classic myths as long as it resembles it to a certain degree. However, the plot is confusing as all hell. Is Hyperion actually a Titan? Because he looks like a human (a fucking huge man with beard like seaweed, but a human at least) as opposed to his stony-skinned brothers. I may have read somewhere that he somehow escaped the war in heaven and possessed the body of a fisherman (Hyperion himself is barely mentioned in the Titanomachy), but there's no mention of it. How did he assemble his army so quickly? What did he promise his men that causes such loyalty to him?

And why does he wear a vagina dentata mask?

And while I'm questioning the plot, why can't the gods interfere? If the Titans are set loose, that threatens their rule, and also the lives of all those fleshy prayer-shitters on Earth that give them power. So surely they would take every possible precaution in making sure that doesn't happen? Why even imprison them? Gods and Titans are immortals only in the sense they don't apparently age and have powers beyond mortal ken; they can be killed, and indeed we do see them killed, so why did they not just kill the Titans? Did they just think that wasn't playing fair? Who set the rules about non-interference in the first place? Zeus frequently mentions that the humans must do it so they can maintain free will, but a lot of what happens is machinated by the Gods themselves - Zeus personally trains and mentors Theseus under the guise of an old man (Hurt) to prepare him as a soldier. Poseidon (Kellan Lutz) creates a tsunami to protect Theseus and his merry band of misfits that apparently doesn't do more damage than cover things with mud.

Wouldn't all these qualify as divine intervention? Is this taking place in some other version of mythology where Zeus doesn't disguise himself as bulls and swans and clouds just so he can go to Earth and fuck mortal women? He takes this rule seriously, even killing one of his kin to enforce it; apparently it's OK when he does it.

Zeus is off the CHAIN in this movie! Hahaha!
...I hate myself.

Gaps in logic aside, the plot is rather slapdash anyway. Minor characters come and go more-or-less as they're required - Stephen Dorff's character is mostly on hand to make a sardonic comment, but is otherwise rarely used; a mute Monk tags along, seemingly only there to get outraged when he sees what's done to the Oracles, and Phaedra herself serves as Miss Exposition, giving information when it's handy. I didn't even know half the names of these characters until near the end; true story, I looked up the film on Wikipedia, and found that Heracles was in this. Where? Was he one of the Gods? Why did nobody say so? Cavill tries his best, but his character is pretty much incidental to what goes on. Theseus acquires the Epirus Bow, uses it for a bit, then loses it to Hyperion almost immediately, who uses it for more than a bit, then it just gets hurried out and Theseus gets bailed out by the gods. Even the driving object of the plot proves pointless. He makes a rousing call-to-arms, but the real war is between the Gods and the Titans, and he doesn't even show up that much in the battle against Hyperion's forces, so his struggles don't matter.

Before any of you complain that I'm nitpicking the plot of a goofy action film, Immortals gives you plenty of time to dwell on these holes because it's paced like an opera. There are long interminable gaps between action scenes, ostensibly to focus on the characters, but they're such blank cyphers it's impossible to care about them. An action film needs to be fast-paced, moving from event to event quickly, just enough for the audience to draw breath after one set piece so they can move to the other. Only Theseus gets something approaching a character, with the death of his mother at the hands of Hyperion and some clumsy peasant racism to overcome, and at least he gets a rousing speech before the big battle. Tarsem did this in his last film, the spectacularly beautiful The Fall (which I highly recommend, by the way, particularly if you have an HD TV), but there he had strong performances and a sweet relationship between his two leads, peppered with gorgeous fantasy sequences. The film takes such time getting from A to B it becomes boring.

Now onto the visuals. Tarsem freely admits he didn't give one solitary shit about the script or the plot, and instead decided to imbibe it with his own artistic sensibilities. This is really the only major selling point of the film - a mixture of live sets and CGI, it looks really damned good, quite unlike anything we've seen in a blockbuster before. The expression "300 for art students" has been bandied about a lot, including by yours truly, and it's not a bad description. It at least succeeds in producing a striking and memorable scene every couple of minutes, with some actually pretty good use of 3D (the opening title sequence in particular looks like a triptych), and Eiko Ishioka's work on the costumes needs to be recognised by any major award committee, from Ares' Mohican helmet of spikes to the "Minotaur"'s barbed-wire bull helmet. Colour plays an important role in the film, and serves to characterise where the script cannot - anything divine or associated with the Gods is gold, from the armour Zeus and his children wear into battle to the cage imprisoning the Titans, even down to Hyperion's kingly mask. The Titans have scaled mottled-grey skin, and are first seen with their teeth clasped around rods, like cattle, emphasising their beastly nature; Hyperion's clothing, and that of his army, is mostly grey and drab to emphasise this.

This points to another problem with the film, however; despite the inherent wackiness of the costumes, it's all played with a straight face. There's no tongue in cheek-ness about it, no sense that anyone's aware of how ridiculous it all appears, and nobody seems to crack a smile throughout, which just makes it all the more sillier. The scene where Zeus kills Ares is meant to be very serious, as Zeus has to murder his child to maintain a completely arbitrary law. Instead, it becomes unintentionally hilarious when we see Ares' smouldering corpse plastered against the wall like Wile E. Coyote after falling off a cliff. I honestly expected to see stars circling above his head. And this isn't even mentioning Hyperion's ridiculous helmet, which looks like a cross between a stag beetle, the shark on the Jaws poster, and an adorable bunny rabbit.

Despite all their rage, they're still just rats in a cage.

The action itself, once the film actually gets to it, is satisfyingly brutal. If you've seen the trailer, I can tell you a LOT of blood and dismemberment has been edited out of that. Humans, Gods and Titans bleed CGI gore frequently and messily; skulls are smashed in, arms go flying, eyes get popped out, heads are severed, tongues are cut out, a man gets castrated by a warhammer (as part of a general legacy theme that occasionally pops up throughout the narrative), and Hyperion keeps prisoners in a brass bull. Look that up if you're confused, and you don't mind sleepless nights. Cavill acquits himself well in the fight scenes, with his appropriately kouros-like physique, at least making him a credible action hero and giving me some hope for his upcoming Superman film The Man of Steel with Zack Snyder. Fight scenes themselves are a bit of an odd mix - with Cavill spinning around and sliding like a dervish, there's a balletic element to the combat, best shown in any fights involving the Gods.

Rather than go the Zack Snyder route of slowing the film down during crucial moments then speeding it back up again, as though to make up for lost time, Tarsem has it both ways. The Gods move in superspeed, leaving golden waves behind them while the combatants fall as though through water, and giving us glorious slow-mo shots of heads being smashed open, feeling like a brutal ballet. This is an interesting contrast to Theseus' big no-holds barred showdown with Hyperion; with no godly weapons, the two simply brawl it out bare-knuckle style, using cheap tricks and wrestling throws. Not to say these fights don't pack a punch, because they do and a fight means more when the combatants look like they're actually getting cut up, but comparing this style to the more elegant one seen before, it's a wee bit jarring.

I may very well frame this on my wall if it's rendered large enough.

In the end, I don't really know how to feel about Immortals. I do really like the visual style, and the action falls on the right side of an R-rating, but everything else feels so slipshod and work-for-hire I can't really say it's good. Tarsem financed his last film The Fall out of his own pocket, shooting in over twenty countries over a period of four years with very little digital effects work, so it could very well be that this is a paycheck more than anything. Not to say he didn't try hard in making it look like how he imagined it, but if the director doesn't seem to care about what he's shooting, and only really focuses on the imagery, then why should I? On the other hand, I'm hoping that the film does well enough that directors can shoot otherwise rote, formulaic action blockbusters in new experimental ways, and to mine some of that fertile ground I talked about in the intro.

But I honestly can't recommend Immortals. All the distinctive images I talked about, the film's big selling point, can be seen in all the trailers for that, which you can watch for free on YouTube, if I haven't already posted them here. Hell, I had to print-screen most of these images from the trailer. There's really no point in paying £8 for some pretty images if the substance behind them is lacking.