Moviegoers could be forgiven for writing off what advertising presents as a next-generation clone of 300 and Clash of the Titans. But the third picture from Tarsem Singh – known professionally as Tarsem – has something no sword-and-sorcery forebear has ever possessed: Tarsem himself.
Lush and grim, Immortals dispenses with the overt fascist politics of 300 and the happily-ever-after contrivances of Clash of the Titans to follow the mad tyrant King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) in his quest for the Epirus bow, an artifact which will enable him to unleash the conquered, immortal titans from the mountain in which the Olympian gods imprisoned them and in so doing presumably end all human life along with his own misery.
The Immortals  Directed by Tarsem Singh. Starring Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, Stephen Dorff, Luke Evans, Freida Pinto, John Hurt. |
His only obstacle is the unlikely Theseus (Henry Cavill), a peasant with a mysterious tutor (John Hurt) who educates him both in combat and in respect for life. When Hyperion destroys Theseus’s town and kills his mother, he joins forces with a thief, Stavros (Stephen Dorff), and the oracular virgin priestess Phaedra (Freida Pinto) to stop Hyperion by any means necessary.
As with Tarsem’s previous films, The Cell and The Fall, the primary reason to see The Immortals is for its visuals: carven cliff-side villages hugging the crags over an expanse of sea; aerial battles worthy of Milton; altars and temples and catacombs as ornate as any on Earth.
It’s fanciful and beautiful stuff.
But a note to the faint of heart: the same level of attention paid to the architecture, scenery, and costuming is trained on the mutilation of human bodies – good and evil – from the hammering and gouging of highly sensitive bodyparts to outright evisceration. Accordingly, The Immortals is rated 18A in Canada.
3D is used effectively to give a sense of scale in myriad shots of sweeping vistas and ancient cities. However, the dimming caused by the glasses makes a grimy world even darker, and director Tarsem’s signature visual flair might do better with the added luminosity than with a third dimension it never fully capitalizes upon.
Though Immortals handles the gods a lot better than did predecessor Clash of the Titans (which, amusingly, contained no titans, while Immortals has got oodles of them), beginning with the fact that Olympians other than Zeus actually get to speak, it still presents grave flaws. Demigod (and mortal hero) Heracles is inexplicably among the pantheon in this movieverse, while Hades, Artemis, Hephaestus, Dionysus, and other major deities go unnamed or unseen.
And like Clash, Tarsem’s Immortals filters the whole of Greek spirituality through a familiar Judeo-Christian lens, resulting in gods who are supposed to remain aloof in order for mankind to “prove itself,” to the point where even Zeus (Clash of the Titans alum Luke Evans), king of the gods, seems to be following orders rather than giving them as would be his right.
Performance-wise, the gods do what is required of them with aplomb, though Kellan Lutz seems out of his element – if not his league – playing Poseidon, and Isabel Lucas is as wrong for the part of Athena as she would have been right for Aphrodite.
Henry Cavill is up to the task playing Theseus, and his worst moment – an impromptu exhortation speech just before the final battle – is something no actor could have made superb; he brings intensity to his fighting scenes and sincerity to his human interactions, giving every indication he will do justice to the title role in Zack Snyder’s upcoming comic reboot, Man of Steel.
But it is Mickey Rourke who is in finest form on the acting front, giving Hyperion a quality of violence and crazed fury that simmers just beneath a surface of embittered nihilism.
If its failings are a trite plot and gratuitous violence taken almost to a new extreme, Immortals will certainly go down as the prettiest of the sword-and-sandals epics of the new millennium thus far, and not only that but as the crucible in which a new Superman was forged.