“The ideas and themes at play in Immortals are unique and compelling enough to overcome many of the film’s obvious other flaws.”
By William BibbianiNovember 10, 2011
Immortals is a big, beautiful, sumptuous mess that I absolutely adore. It’s awkwardly plotted and thoroughly overblown, and yet I will defend it to the death in spite of those things because it’s not really a “movie” in any traditional sense. It runs at 24 frames per second and is playing at your local movie house, and yes, it tells a story featuring big time Hollywood actors, but Immortals is more of a pageant than anything else. There’s no other way to explain all the silly hats. And pageants don’t need to be coherent to do their job right.
Yes, Immortals gives unto you a procession of crazy hats. Big metal Mohawks that are the enemy of doors everywhere, bizarre seashell contraptions that make Kellan Lutz look like he’s playing “dress up” with his little baby sister (who is apparently a metallurgist), and weird lamprey eel-type cowls that wrap themselves around Mickey Rourke’s head, and have bunny ears. Every single one of them earns a smattering of applause upon their first appearance. In fact, most of the strange visual stylings of Tarsem Singh are worthy of applause in Immortals. Mostly for the right reasons.
What Tarsem Singh has done – we’ll get to the plot in a minute, hang on – is create a primer for every future 3D movie to follow. Singh gets it. He knows how to shoot a movie that takes advantage of 3D in a way that naysayers like myself can’t deny. He bathes his sets in light, compensating for the dimness of the glasses, and keeps his camera locked down tight, only gliding it along at a misty pace when necessary. Immortals never screws with your brain by cutting between a variety of depths. From a photographic standpoint, it’s almost subdued. Perhaps that’s why he overcompensated with outlandish production design and narrative bombast.
About that bombast: Immortals tells the story of Theseus (future Superman Henry Cavill), who has been secretly groomed since birth by Zeus himself to be a great leader of men. The irony is that Theseus has become a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, but that’s not important right away. What’s important is that King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) has come a-conquering with his army of masked lunatics, seeking an ancient relic called “The Epirus Bow,” which is basically the world’s first bazooka, thousands of years before they were supposed to be invented. With the Epirus Bow, Hyperion will be able to free The Titans – the rival gods who were imprisoned by the popular Greek pantheon – and take over or possibly destroy the world, depending on who’s describing the plot at any given moment.
http://www.craveonline.com/film/reviews/177895-review-immortals
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
