Action!

I have many guilty pleasures. One of them is my love of over-the-top period piece action films. Whether they are from a comic book, a video game or the original work of a screenwriter doesn't matter. They are all fair game. And it seems unfair to me that these movies get a bad rep just because they tend to lack subtlety in story telling. So here's a list, ending in the most recent one I've seen, followed by my review of said film...

The Mummy & The Mummy Returns (I love these, I don't care what you think!)

Gladiator

Prince of Persia (yeah yeah, suck it)

300 (see above)

Clash of the Titans (the old one)

Conan The Barbarian & Destroyer

Some more that I can't think of at the moment...

and...

Immortals...

Now, this is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination. The story telling is shite... I mean really. These character's reasons for being are just kind of weak in general. However, Tarsem Singh manages to save what could have been an unredeemable film by over saturating it with style. Micky Rourke didn't hurt, and neither did Stephen Dorff (another guilty pleasure). It was a great role for Dorff, if one dimensional (he's kind of a one dimensional actor so maybe that's why the role suited him). It also required that he have his shirt off the whole time, so yay for me.

Anyway, where was I??? Oh yeah, Dorff's torso not withstanding, um... Singh's style is all over this movie, and that is a really really good thing. I think he might be having a love affair with the color red, first off. The reds in all his films are so rich they stand out above everything. It's as if the red items in each scene are there to embrace the characters, or maybe bind them to the film. Except the blood. The blood isn't red, it's purple. And there's lots of it, but I digress.

Singh also uses a lot of geometric shapes. The tiles in the wall behind the king, the cubes and curved walls that exist in the middle of nothing and nowhere, perfectly straight and smooth walls jutting out from jagged rocks. Clearly defined lines. And symmetry. Perfect symmetry except where there isn't, which is purposeful. And Singh knows how to manipulate the camera so that his intricate and detailed sets are properly exploited in each shot. Nothing goes to waste, except the dialogue, and that's not really his fault.

If The Fall (one of Singh's previous films and one that I truly love) was like a journey through Salvador Dali's head, then Immortals is something both older and more contemporary, more fantastical but less surreal (this is where I lament my limited knowledge of art, for try as I might I cannot name an artist that meets this criteria, but I know I've seen what I'm thinking of, somewhere).

The main problems I had with the film, which were easily ignored while trying to take in Singh's stylistic marvels, were thus...

-The dialogue, while not the worst ever (I think that might go to Priest), was unnecessarily bad. And I say that because it could have so easily been fixed.

-The character of Athena was terribly miscast. Athena is the goddess of warfare, wisdom and courage (among other things) and should command a presence. This girl didn't. Though she was very pretty and not a bad actress.

-And the other gods, save for Zeus, were too young. The gods didn't need to be elderly or anything, but they should have at least had a face that looked like it had experienced something. Poseidon looked like Jacob from the fucking Twilight movies for fucks sake.

-Some of the plot points seemed to have been thrown in there at random. It's not that they weren't internally consistent, or beyond the realm of possibility, there was just no set up. First they're here, then they're there. And oh so quickly. You just have to accept it. What it says to me is that the writers didn't know their setting well enough. It's like, we need to get the protagonist and antagonist up into Tartarus somehow so they can have their big showdown. Oh, okay, how about I put a staircase here and one just follows the other and in five seconds they are top of a wall the height of the Hoover Dam. K? K.

-Finally, the stakes weren't really high enough. At any time the gods from Olympus could have come down and put a stop to anything they damn well pleased. And indeed, anytime the "good guys" were in a jam, one of the gods "defied" Zeus and lent a helping hand, effectively barring the protagonists from earning anything on their own.

Okay, that's pretty much it. Seems like a lot to overcome, so you should believe me when I tell you that the Singh style signature is that good. If you don't believe me watch The Cell and The Fall (I like the latter much more than the former, just so you know).

Regardless, it was enjoyable to watch. Oh, one more thing... 3D on this is a waste. 2D would have been perfectly fine, in fact probably better because you're not wearing those damn glasses the whole time.