1 gibble out of 5

Director: Tarsem Singh

Spectacle, thy name is ‘Immortals.’  Goodness.

Are you familiar with Tarsem Singh?  With ‘The Cell,’ or ‘The Fall?’  Then, to some degree, you know what you’re getting with Immortals: a film only committed to its genre (gladiator action) on the surface, stuffed to the brim with visuals visuals visuals.

Singh isn’t known by his shooting style, really, or even a distinct ‘look’ (like Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam), but just in that his costumes and sets are always something to marvel at.  Even, as in The Immortals, when it really doesn’t make any sense at all.  In The Cell and The Fall he sort of gets by on plot hitches – these are dreams, or they’re fantasies, and so we can go bananas with what’s on the screen.  Here, we’re dealing with gods, sure, and Greek gods are certainly examples of excess, but it reeks more of taking the visual indulgences of ‘300’ – which all swirled around a rallying theme of testosterone and violence – and running into film la-la land to get some costuming kicks on.

Meaning: plot falls by the wayside here.  Way on the wayside.  Henry Cavill is Theseus, a good lookin’ fightin’ peasant unknowingly trained by Zeus (in his human guise), to one day battle King Hyperion – Mickey Rourke – and prevent him from releasing the titans, who are some angry looking gits locked up in a box.  There are some oracles and an odd casting choice of Stephen Dorff and some impressively wacky and bloody fight scenes that borrow the slo-mo from Mr. Snyder but give it the visual splash of Singh.

You can criticize the film for playing nice and easy with mythology, but, whatever, it’s mythology, and it’s not like this hasn’t been butchered before.  Where ‘300’ chose to underline every line and shot with the essence of its masculine momentum, though, ‘The Immortals’ can’t muster coherence between scenes, and if we didn’t have some very basic education of little good looking guy vs. scary bad looking guy in films, the movie would be impossible to follow, sequences and dialogue lost underneath a sense of something more important around the corner.  That sense may just be due to Singh’s eagerness to get to where he’s more comfortable – wide, non-dialogue scenes that showcase an image.

The last battle scene has a fun mechanic that makes it a gas to watch, but as the intended crown jewel to this visual orgasm it ends up seeming rather overwrought and empty.  Moments before there’s some impressive moments of a massive battle shot in a narrow tunnel that suggest Singh was figuring out what to do with this action stuff, and it’d be interesting to see him given a movie with no outlet for his grand costumes and see how he applies himself.

So: removed of some dream/reality barrier that could give the movie a feasible balance a la the director’s previous films, ‘The Immortals’ topples into complete excess, scenes seemingly popping up out of nowhere because they’re not given any sense of importance in favor of the Next Big Image.

Is he evil or good? Man, I think you're supposed to be able to tell...

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