If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I was very much looking forward to watching Immortals as I was entering the theater. Ever since 300 inexplicably made more money than the gross national product of many small countries back in 2006 there has been a deluge of highly stylized, ultra violent, sword and sandals pictures. I hated 300, with its claustrophobic set pieces, computer generated backgrounds, slow motion violence, and complete lack of story or charm. The worst thing that could have happened is if I had to sit through Immortals and it was another 300 clone; that would have made me retch. So the best thing I can say about this movie is that it isn’t 300. It introduces you to its characters, it lets you know what they desire, and then and only then does it ask you to watch them struggle. This movie isn’t just violent noise, it at least makes an effort to be a story about people. In this day and age, sometimes that’s enough to be a pleasant surprise.
The protagonist here is Theseus (Henry Cavill). He’s your prototypical sword and sandals movie hero. He’s pretty much the best fighter ever, he’s clean shaven and respectable looking, he loves his mom, and he’s our only chance at beating the bad guys because destiny tells us so. If you’re already handsome and in shape, this isn’t a very hard role to play. All you really have to do is be able to deliver your lines without looking confused and stupid. While I won’t go out of my way to praise Cavill’s performance here, I will say that he’s able to jump, fight and yell without looking stupid and confused. He’s a perfectly acceptable action hero.
The coolest characters this movie has to offer aren’t its heroes though, they’re its villains. Mickey Rourke is playing King Hyperion, a gross, HGH bloated, scraggly bearded jerk who’s been cutting a path through the ancient world, building his army and planning to take on the Gods. Rourke is perfect for this role. He’s big, dumb looking, and very visibly emotionally wounded. It’s perfect for a character who’s lashing out at the world like a dying animal. His plan for destroying everything is to unleash the ancient Titans, who are immortal creatures that have been trapped inside a mountain for untold millennia. It’s a senseless plan that doesn’t really get Hyperion anything, so you need to have an actor who can play crazy to make it work. That’s one thing Rourke does well, and here he even gets all the way from crazy to creepy by going for the Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, casually yet sloppily eating fruit technique. It’s one of the very best; always uncomfortable.
The supporting characters aren’t anything special, but there’s nobody here who really sucks either. Probably the highest profile supporting character is the one played by Freida Pinto. She’s an oracle who has visions of the future, and though it at first seems like she’s going to be an important character who holds all the keys to finding a mystical bow and then either releasing or stopping somebody from releasing the Titans, she really doesn’t end up doing anything. This is a fight between Theseus and Hyperion, plain and simple, and Pinto is just here to be the girl. I feel bad for her because she keeps getting cast in nothing roles like this, but I can’t complain that she’s the one they chose. All the oracle needs to do is be beautiful and mysterious, and Pinto has that in spades. Also, there’s a traitorous jerk named Lysander (Joseph Morgan) who I quite enjoyed. He’s a despicable little weasel who abandons his army to join Hyperion, and for his troubles he gets his face scarred and his balls smashed with a sledge hammer by the crazy king. Watching him slime his way through the movie and become a gelded servant was a fun subplot.
And speaking of balls getting smashed, we should probably address the violence in this film. One of the main reasons to go see this thing is going to be to see all of the fights, battles, and decapitations. Generally the violence is pretty extreme. The fighting is the over the top, intricate, choreographed kind, but it never goes as far as to look balletic and masturbatory in its showiness. It’s always hard hitting and brutal in execution, so you feel like there’s some real danger and stakes involved in engaging in a scrap. The swordplay can get pretty gory, and generally I appreciated that, but there are a few instances of distractingly computer generated blood geysers that annoyed me. There are multiple decapitations here, some in which somebody chops a fake prop head off of a dude, and some in which a computer animated head gets severed from a computer animated body, and it’s not hard to guess which were cool and which were lame. A CG decapitation is no decapitation at all. So while there was some hokey looking computer effects going on, there was also some practical stuff I appreciated. Immortals doesn’t get drown in fake looking, animated nonsense like so many other films these days do.
Another big reason people will want to see this is the visuals. This is a Tarsem Singh movie, after all, and if you’ve seen The Cell or The Fall you know that production design and trippy visual flourish is the bulk of what he has to offer as a director. Much like in those films, there are scenes in this one that are inventive looking and kind of cool, but never enough to elevate the material and distract you from the fact that what you’re watching is kind of silly and resembling of classic B movies. And you do get a little bit of that 300 claustrophobia every once in a while, where you feel like you’re trapped in a soundstage; but it’s not nearly as pervasive. Generally I was appreciative of the visual indulgences, like when a decorative mask morphs into a boat that our heroes are on as a scene transition. At least it shows that somebody is putting in a little effort.
Most of the problems I had with this film came down to the storytelling. All of the conflict in the story comes from the fact that Theseus has to stop King Hyperion from releasing the Titans. While the Gods above don’t want this to happen, they are forbidden to interfere in human affairs. Except, they keep interfering anyway. Zeus (Luke Evans) says he has faith in Theseus and mankind in general, but it appears to be unfounded. At every turn Theseus fails at everything he’s supposed to do, and then some God swoops down from the Heavens and saves him. They’re a series of deus ex machina outs, and it robs the film of all its tension. Finally, after a series of systematic failures, Theseus fails to stop Hyperion from releasing the Titans as well (which was the whole point of the movie), and then Zeus has to come down and battle them anyway. Of course, this needed to happen because we needed the cool action sequences where Zeus and company show off their God powers; but it didn’t need to be such a vanilla inevitability.
Zeus coming down and intervening should have been the absolute last resort, not he thing that we were patiently waiting for. Every bit of tension and suspense should have been milked out of the question of whether or not Theseus could stop Hyperion from releasing the Titans. The Titans getting released should have been the end game that there was absolutely no coming back from, and Theseus should have pushed himself to the limits of human endurance to stop it. He should have sacrificed huge, gave everything he had, and then lost to a fixed game. That’s how you build a good action movie; it’s all in the life and death consequences, it’s all in the struggle. Then, when Zeus did come down and fight the Titans, it would have seemed like a crazy moment that went beyond everything you were expecting. Instead, with the way this movie was structured, we were just waiting for the battle between Zeus and the Titans, and everything that came before it felt like time-wasting filler. It was kind of fun, if mindless, time-wasting filler, but it was filler nonetheless. You can’t make a good movie out of filler, just one that’s not particularly terrible. This movie didn’t know what it had. It gave us everything without any tease. It didn’t work it. I can abide a movie being a stupid action romp, but I also need it to be a bit of a hustler.
