Immortals Review

written by: SAH

Includes minor spoilers (most inferable from the trailer).

I was going to skip Immortals, but two things drove me to a matinee this past weekend: The director, Tarsem Singh (The Cell; The Fall; Mirror, Mirror), whose movies tend to be visually interesting, bordering on surreal. The second was a review deriding the movie for its violence and calling for a new \"hard R\" rating. I was intrigued. What would that look like? As it turns out, mostly exploding heads in slow motion.

The movie assumes the audience knows a fair amount about Greek mythology, characters and themes. It takes liberties with classical interpretation of these elements, but it helps to know something going in. For example, though a pantheon of gods are present, only Zeus and Athena are called out by name. The rest you\'ll have to deduce based on costumes and actions. Not that this is detrimental in any way. I thought it was kind of clever. I would have understood the roles even if Zeus and Athena had also remained unnamed. Clearly, the director was going for style, and by choosing well-trod territory he didn\'t need to linger on story. And he didn\'t.

In short, Theseus (Henry Cavill, aka the new Superman -- another reason I decided to see the movie) must stop/get revenge on Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), a ruthless and brutal king who seeks to end the rule of the gods by unleashing the titans. This may sound a bit generic, and it is, but I think it\'s hard for anything based on Greek myth to seem original as nearly all of Western storytelling has been ripping off their themes for a couple thousand years now.

It plays out as one might expect.

The most interesting aspects of the movie are those that undoubtedly sparked the \"hard R\" comment, so I can see how, if those offended you, you\'d write off the movie entirely. And in fact, without those scenes, the movie is pretty pointless.

Whenever the gods interact with people and or titans, the level of brutality exhibited is ... breathtaking. In one scene a god use a hammer on the heads of a handful of enemies. It plays out in slow motion, each head blooming at the impact like a gooey rose. It might not seem like it, but there is beauty in this brutality. Many scenes feel like a living painting. It\'s an interesting effect.

Because of this fast-then-slow action, the comparisons to 300 are apt, though 300 is a superior movie in every way, and the slow/stopped motion aspect of that effect are amplified in Immortals. That said, and as somewhat derivative as it may be, the god vs. titan battle in Immortals is damn near worth the price of admission alone... if you can stomach it.

I should note that the violence is not of the stomach-churning torture-porn variety you get in movies like Hostel. Because of the use of CGI, it\'s more like an oil painting: slick, detached snapshots of extreme (spectacular) bodily destruction. It does not seem \"real,\" which helps. It actually reminded me a bit of Blade (and not just because Stephen Dorff is in it).

Overall, Immortals is unique enough to justify seeing, but expect more from the visuals than the story. Signh is a director with a good eye for visual impact. Now all he needs is a good script.

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