Mixed Reviews For Tasem Singh's Immortals

Well I guess it was to be expected. Movies like this generally polarize critics. Look back on the initial mixed/poor reaction to 300, a movie most of us can agree is pretty damn good. Anyway until we see for ourselves we have this first handful of reviews to go by. Most agree that visually the movie is spectacular, but that it lacks in story, character development etc. Welcome to your average special effects driven "blockbuster" people. Performance wise though most praise our next Superman Henry Cavill as solid but without the material to really shine. Mickey Rourke by all accounts makes a fine bad guy and the supporting cast (Frieda Pinto, Steven Dorff etc) earn praise too, but again most say that the script lets em down.

This is a bizarre, sinister children’s picture book for grownups transposed to the big screen..

There’s a lot of cheek to Immortals, but what makes it weirdly captivating is how nimble it is, particularly in contrast to how leaden other recent attempts to do something similar have been. (I’m looking at you, awful Clash of the Titans remake.) It genuinely feels like the flight of dark fancy it is aiming to be.

The 300 comparisons for this ultra-styled, ultra-violent Greek epic are inevitable, but this is more expansive, embracing mythology and abandoning historical fidelity in favour of flights of grotesque fancy. By some distance Tarsem’s most coherent and commercial film to date, the tale of Theseus (an impressively heroic Cavill) fighting an overwhelmingly evil force led by Rourke’s Hyperion to avoid a war in the heavens largely makes sense (unlike, say, The Cell) and the breathtaking costumes and design feel helpful rather than overwhelming (unlike, at times, The Fall). It all looks so beautiful and bizarre that odd moments will stay with you long afterwards, and while the plot feels as though it’s scissored up and patched back together in a few places, it will leave you wanting more, and optimistic about Tarsem’s Snow White.

It won’t do anything to win over those not already partial to Tarsem’s style, but it has more than enough blood, guts and glamour to satisfy – and Cavill looks like a superman.

When they arrive, the battles are stirring, majestic and eye-popping. Between them, alas, lie chasms of boredom, sibling writers Charley and Vlas Parlapanides advancing the plot at a glacial pace that makes that allusion to paintings only too fitting..

Good-looking to a fault, Immortals boasts moments of undeniable grandeur. Elsewhere, though, it is deathly dull. Tarsem Singh may well be an artistic visionary. Unfortunately, his sense of storytelling here is vision-impaired.

The film is fairly violent at times, but it’s dramatically vacuous action with little to no weight. Fight scenes reminiscent of 300 not only come across as shockingly derivative, but also inferior to the film they’re lifted from. The film’s crescendo, a large-scale battle between warring human beings and, later, between more supernatural entities, loses interest before it even begins, requiring Theseus to make one of the worst motivational war speeches in recent memory. When the Olympians finally get called into action late on, they are unforgivably sidelined in a series of increasingly shallow CGI-inflected brawls.

It’s presented in 3D, but the post-production conversion adds nothing to proceedings. There is one scene, in which a horse’s galloping hooves kick dust into the screen, which looks particularly poor. Underwritten, dramatically shallow and visually disappointing, Immortals is a missed opportunity. Unlike the myths on which it is based, it will be quickly forgotten.

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