I hadn't planned on watching
Immortals.
I'd seen the
trailer and thought the film looked goofy. But a spur
of the moment decision to go to the movies late at night resulted in
having to make the decision to see either
Jack and Jill or
Immortals
and I wasn't in the mood to see a film where the humor appeared to
revolve around how ridiculous
Adam Sandler looks dressed as a woman.
Unfortunately,
Immortals was as goofy
as presaged by its
trailer. Fortunately, much of its goofiness began
to surface in the latter half of the film so I was, at least,
initially entertained. Unfortunately, the goofiness, when it began
to appear, was so goofy that it probably disproportionately affected
my opinion of the film.
Immortals recounts the story of
Theseus
(
Henry Cavill), as he attempts to prevent
Hyperion (
Mickey Rourke),
the Heraklion King of Crete, from freeing the
Titans, who are
imprisoned in Mount Tartarus, and using them to destroy the
gods. In
order to accomplish his apocalyptic mission,
Hyperion needs the
Epirius Bow, a magical weapon that allows its wielder to do things
which are normally only possible when playing a video game on cheat
mode.
Theseus is aided by the beautiful
virgin oracle Phaedra (
Freida Pinto) who really doesn't do a whole
lot in the film except drop some misleading hints as to what will
ultimately happen, save
Theseus's life by going mother bird on him
and regurgitating water into his parched mouth and get naked
(
courtesy of a body double).
Phaedra before she gets (sort of) naked
Theseus's battle with the
Minotaur
doesn't really play a prominent role in
Immortals, which is strange
considering that this battle is what
Theseus is famous for. Frankly,
I was just glad that it was included at all. However, it was only a
fairly abbreviated action sequence and the labyrinth in which it took
place wasn't really labyrinthy enough, being easily navigable by
Theseus via the simple expedient of cutting himself and leaving a
trail of his own blood. To make matters worse,
Theseus's discovery
of the Epirius Bow, the weapon crucial to
Hyperion's plan to unleash
the
Titans, just before he was ambushed by the
Minotaur, overshadowed
the following battle and its resolution. I did, however, like that
the
Minotaur was only referred to as "The Beast" in
Immortals although I'm at a loss to articulate why.
Theseus battles the
Minotaur in the Labyrinth. In Immortals, the Minotaur is just some
dude in a funky hat that a dom might wear
The
Greek gods are portrayed as being
very young and good looking while the
Titans are portrayed as a bunch
of hyperactive savages with really bad skin.
Hephaestus, blacksmith
of the
gods, is nowhere to be seen. I suppose the presence of a god
who was crippled and considered grotesque would have been
inconsistent with
Immortals's portrayal of the
Greek dieties as a
bunch of teenaged
Aryans.
Hera, wife of
Zeus (
Luke Evans), is
also notably absent in
Immortals. I guess it would have been awkward
having to explain that she was not only
Zeus's wife, but also his
sister. The family connection between the
gods and the
Titans (
Zeus
and
Hera were the children of the
Titans Cronus and
Rhea) isn't even
mentioned, thus saving the audience from whatever convoluted
explanation that the screenwriters would have had to come up with to
explain why the
gods and the
Titans don't seem to share any sort of
family resemblance at all.
The Titans, progenitors
of the gods. The family resemblance is very well concealed
Frankly, I'm not sure if the portrayal
of the
gods as a bunch of beautiful young people worked. They just
seemed to lack the gravitas that I would associate with
gods and this
contributed to the film's goofiness whenever they appeared. Their
costumes only exacerbated this problem. In her short, gold skirt,
Athena (
Isabel Lucas) looked more like a cheerleader than the goddess
of wisdom and war.
Athena is also the
virgin patron of
Athens.
Frankly, in
Immortals, she didn't look very
virginal at all. If
anything, she looked deliciously unvirginal.
Athena, goddess of war
and wisdom and virgin patron of Athens
And whoever thought
Ares (
DanielSharman), the
god of war, would look totally bad ass in what can only
be described as a sword hat or Stegosaurus helmet was, to put it
mildly, sadly mistaken.
Ares, god of war,
sporting the sword hat
The mighty Stegosaurus,
possible inspiration of Ares's choice of headwear
In addition to the goofiness of
Immortals's portrayal of the
Greek gods, what began to grate on me
was just the fact that the film required you to turn your brain off
in order to take it seriously.
Zeus's explanation for why the
gods
must not take an active role in the battle between
Hyperion and
Theseus (Man has faith in us so we must have faith in man) is one of
those phrases that sounds pithy and erudite at first but upon deeper
reflection is revealed to have as much depth as something you'd find
in a
fortune cookie.
Zeus's insistence on the
gods following
a sort of
Olympian Prime Directive in regards to the affairs of man
seems all the more strange given that one of these men (
Hyperion) is
trying to kill the
gods. It's also a little bit ironic that had the
gods answered
Hyperion's prayers to save his family, he wouldn't have
developed a total hard-on for them, and the whole crisis depicted in
Immortals would've been averted.
There's also the question of why
Zeus
didn't immediately use the anti-
Titan self-destruct device in Mount
Tartarus to kill the
Titans after they were freed. I had assumed
that triggering the device would've killed the
gods who were present
in the mountain but when
Zeus finally activated it, he was able to
ascend to
Mount Olympus, leaving the
Titans to die and leaving me
wondering why he couldn't have activated it immediately after the
Titans were freed and, thus,
prevent the bloody slaughter of half
the gods of the
Greek pantheon. Of course, that would've meant that we, the
audience, wouldn't have gotten to see the kick-ass slow-motion battle
scene depicting said bloody slaughter.
Speaking of battle scenes, one of the
biggest head-scratchers in the movie was just what
Hyperion was
trying to accomplish having his numerically superior Cretan army
attack the numerically inferior Athenian army through a little hole
that he had blown in the wall separating them using the Epirius Bow.
Why not make more holes or make a really big hole instead of having
your forces attack through a narrow passageway that could be blocked
and defended by a few dozen men?
Way to use your numerical superiority
to maximum advantage,
Hyperion!
Just how did this guy get to be king,
anyway?
Frankly, watching the seemingly endless
hordes of the CGI animated Cretan army go pouring into this tiny hole
and realizing that this was probably intended to be epic made me
titter.
And the scene where
Theseus exhorts the
Athenian army to find its courage in the face of seemingly
insurmountable odds (the Athenians would have probably not needed the
pep talk had they known that
Hyperion would've been so sporting as to
attack them through a narrow bottleneck of his own making), which
looked painfully goofy in the
trailer, was even more goofy in the
film, since only an abbreviated version of
Theseus channeling
Henry V
was shown in the previews.
To top it all off, in addition to being
a goofy, albeit good-looking, movie,
Immortals has the dubious
distinction of being possibly the most sadistic, non-
torture porn
movie to have been released in quite some time. There's enough
torture in
Immortals to give a
neo-con a boner (and possibly some
ideas on what to add to the list of allowable
enhanced interrogationtechniques) and a lot of people seem to get speared through the head
in the film's battle scenes.
This seems to happen a
lot in Immortals
