Written by Charley Parlapanides & Vlas Parlapanides
Directed by Tarsem Singh
“To those who much is given, much is lost.”
Immortals is a deeply disturbing film.
It is a film that revels in violence and brutality…although it doesn’t glamorize it. This is a film determined to tell the story of a vicious, horrifying, and brutal time period…one where our morals — our viewpoint of the world — is completely absent. People are killed, tortured, mutilated, castrated, and victimized in the most graphic of ways…yet the feeling it engenders is a fascinating repulsion…and thankfulness that we are no longer such a race. But it’s a reminder that we are always capable of returning to such barbarism.
It is a film that eschews happy endings, fixed conclusions, and finality of any kind. Instead, it looks at history as moving in cycles — cycles of conflict, cycles of redemption and sacrifice. There will always be wars…new conflicts, new generals, new battles, and new saviours. But the conflict itself never ends. Is it a battle against evil? Or a battle against humanity’s very nature? Even the gods enter this conflict, and do not emerge unscathed, as large numbers of their own kind are killed in in an even larger conflict; these deaths in particular come with a surprising sense of shock. Immortals in name only? Or should the question be: what is true immortality? The movie predicates this around the conflict between Theseus and Hyperion…and it offers two, equally valid answers.
It’s a far deeper, far more unsettling film experience than I was expecting. The violence is graphic but framed like a series of Renaissance paintings. The gods are all Raphaelite in their youth and beauty…yet it never detracts from Zeus’ wisdom and ancient worry. The settings are all cliff edges, abysses, deserts — islands of humanity, in seas of inaccessibility. Everything about life in this movie is dangerous…including the ordinary living of it.
The script lets the side down. It strip-mines the legend of Theseus, but never makes it clear what you are watching. The story hopscotches across too many plot threads, and too many characters, to offer them the depth they deserve…or dwell on their mythic significance. Everyone ends up being a chess piece in the greater scheme of making a movie that is a pure visual experience. In some respects, this works…but in others, there’s a sense that something extra is missing. Some significant meaning that the filmmakers find incredibly elusive. It ends up resulting in an emotional movie experience…but an unexpectedly empty one as well.
Immortals isn’t a classic…but it’s a brave film in that it wants the audience to come away with more than a night of adrenaline-fueled popcorn eating. It wants you to really think about what you are feeling, after the fact. Those feelings are ambiguous and all over the place…but they are honestly conveyed, and keenly felt. Something that films like 300 could use by the bucket load.
7
