Movie Reviews: ‘Immortals’

By Bob Garver

The world does not need “Immor­tals”. We’ve have quite enough films with Greeks and gods and swords and san­dals and cliffs lately. There’s 2007’s “300”, a film filled with vio­lence and twisted images that “Immor­tals” seems to be bla­tantly rip­ping off. There was that lousy “Clash of the Titans” remake from last year, which I had hap­pily for­got­ten about until now. Even this year has already brought us “Thor”, which got a bad year of block­busters off to an omi­nous start. “Immor­tals” has lit­tle of inter­est or orig­i­nal­ity to con­tribute to the genre, and serves only to make it audi­ence think twice before pur­chas­ing a ticket to an upcom­ing variation.

The story is one of the slop­pi­est I’ve ever seen. From what I could tell, it’s about a human named The­seus (Henry Cav­ill) who wants to stop the evil King Hype­r­ion (Mickey Rourke) from tak­ing over the world. Hype­r­ion intends to do so by free­ing the oth­er­worldly Titans from a prison that looks like a foos­ball table. This will allow them to kill all of Greece’s gods (a tall order con­sid­er­ing they’re gods and they impris­oned the Titans in the first place) and then I guess they’re sup­posed to be so grate­ful that they put him in charge of Earth.

Rourke is scary and intim­i­dat­ing as Hype­r­ion, but he’s not a very bright vil­lain. He thought­lessly makes an enemy of The­seus and then leaves him alive to seek revenge. He also has the ques­tion­able goal of want­ing to father the entire world. This tells us that he’s self­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic, but it’s such a logis­ti­cal night­mare con­sid­er­ing the pop­u­la­tions involved. Also, he sees to it that his own men can’t father any chil­dren them­selves. He sees to it with a sledge­ham­mer. How in the world does he get men to fol­low him? Sure he can threaten them with death, but I still can’t imag­ine many men who wouldn’t risk death com­pared to sub­mit­ting to the sledge­ham­mer treatment.

There’s some non­sense with the gods and their will­ing­ness to inter­fere with human affairs. They serve lit­tle pur­pose other than to jus­tify the unique out­fits depicted on the film’s posters. There’s even more non­sense with an ora­cle (Freida Pinto) who is cru­cial to Hyperion’s plan, yet he is suc­cess­ful with­out her. She may ulti­mately serve lit­tle pur­pose in the story, but I think most audi­ence mem­bers (espe­cially males) will for­give her when they see her pas­sion­ate love scene with Theseus.

The film mis­tak­enly thinks that it’s beau­ti­ful. Long, lov­ing looks are given to sets and scenery. Not a minute goes by where we’re not sup­posed to be awestruck by the film’s cliffs, oceans, moun­tains, and heav­ens. This is also one of those movies that treats its most vio­lent scenes as ele­gant, and a lot of unnec­es­sary empha­sis is put on that. I thought most of the scenes looked ugly and the spe­cial effects looked cheap. But the film has been receiv­ing praise for its over­all look, so maybe I’m in the minor­ity on this one.

I’ll toss “Immor­tals” a half star for its love scene, but I found noth­ing else to like. The film can’t go very long with­out mak­ing a fool of itself. The story in par­tic­u­lar has been shame­fully mis­han­dled. I think we’re sup­posed to for­get the story and just sit back and enjoy the action. I’ve already for­got­ten almost every­thing about the story and the action. “Immor­tals” is a for­get­table film, a use­less entry in a genre that lately has seen many use­less entries. I do remem­ber one thing very vividly: how much I wanted to go home.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Immor­tals” is rated R for sequences of strong bloody vio­lence and a scene of sex­u­al­ity. Its run­ning time is 110 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Nov 30 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.