(Zack Snyder, 2016)
Forced to try to make super-hero movies in a different way to Marvel, Warner Bothers and DC have gone all-in on grim and gritty. That might be in part an attempt to duplicate the success Christopher Nolan experienced with his Dark Knight trilogy, which embraced the darker aspects of Batman mythology, largely eschewing any humour, campness or fun along the way.
Snyder already aped that approach with Man of Steel, and here he brings in his own interpretation of the "Bat of Gotham" to set up the extended Universe DC presumably feels is their right, looking at the industry-altering success Marvel has enjoyed with its unending flow of Marvel Universe product.
And that approach has its strengths. Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (explicitly nodding to the hints of the coming Justice League in a few scenes here) is positively stuffed to the gills with stuff. With easter eggs, characters, gadgets, dialogue, cgi, mythology, action, exposition, technobabble, ephemera, spectacle: just stuff. It also has more ideas than any Marvel film, which may be another of the legacies left by Christopher Nolan.
It's just that in his films, the ideas are foregrounded. Indeed, if his Batman trilogy has a major flaw, it is an inability to balance the demands of an action spectacle with his own desire to engage with big themes. Well, Zack Snyder can do the action spectacle in his sleep. But the big themes are a different story. He allows his characters to expound upon the nature of heroism and power, but that's it. The film doesn't pursue these ideas in any meaningful way. Instead, Snyder flicks through them en route to another big slugfest action sequence. And so the tone isn't earned by the story it frames, and it just seems slightly, unnecessarily grim.
But then perhaps this is the perfect superhero film for the modern world; teetering on the edge of anarchy (glimpsed in a Batman nightmare filled with more Darkseid-shaped easter eggs), split between those who worship powerful figures (Snyder conjures one lovely scene where revellers at a Mexican Day of the Dead festival bow and stretch to touch the Kryptonian) and those who despise them (Batman is feared and seen as a myth), mired in bureaucracy (a surprising amount of plot is spent dealing with import permission) and secretly run by the powerful mega-rich.
Snyder is as visually assured as ever. This is perhaps best seen in the way he shoots Batman - an early encounter with two beat cops treats him like a horror character; seen in blurred background and shadow. The later take-down of a warehouse full of armed thugs is the closest approximation of the Batman I grew up reading I have ever seen. Mixing tech and fighting acumen, it is easily the best action scene in the film; thrillingly shot and cut without resorting to slo-mo, Snyder's personal visual tic.
The cast is strong, which helps carry some of the more shockingly badly written scenes. Ben Affleck makes for an appealingly tired and sombre Bruce Wayne, (a somewhat underused) Cavill is more confident as Clark/Superman, and Amy Adams makes Lois more vulnerable than she was in Man of Steel. Jeremy Irons is a nicely sardonic Alfred, while Gal Gadot is magnetic and does well with no real part in her handful of scenes as Wonder Woman. Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor as a damaged manchild, a super villain in word and gesture before ever becoming one in deed, all titters, furies and whimsically murderous asides and impulses.
The plot is an awkward thing. It shows that this was a movie conceived in a panic just days before it was announced as a way to combat the empire-building of Marvel. The narrative hoops screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S Goyer jump through in order to get the two titular heroes face-to-face feel formidable, and the first act is a wonder of fleet exposition and character introduction. After that though it starts to grind a little. Too much going on, too little of it as interesting as it should be. Affleck is good in all of his scenes, but then he has the best character to play. The climactic confrontation is impressive, but instantly gazzumped by the arrival of the cgi Doomsday and Wonder Woman to complete the "trinity" at the heart of the DC Universe.
The cosmetic debt to Frank Miller's the Dark Knight Returns is outweighed by the debt to the (terrible) Death of Superman by Dan Jurgens, which may just sum up the issues with Snyder's film.
But its issues, such as they are, are interesting. This film is a fascinating mess.
Showing posts with label Henry Cavill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Cavill. Show all posts
Monday, 28 March 2016
Monday, 2 November 2015
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.
(Guy Ritchie, 2015)
Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was always going to have to work exceptionally hard to win me over, seeing as it was not Stephen Soderbergh's The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which had always sounded like just my kind of thing.
Ritchie must have liked the sound of that project too, because his movie takes much of its style and approach straight from Soderbergh's "Oceans" movies, most particularly the misunderstood oddball masterpiece at the midpoint in the trilogy, Oceans Twelve.
This is an origin story, detailing the first encounter between 1960s spies from different sides of the Iron curtain. We have suave, confident CIA man Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill, assured) and stubborn, man-mountain KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). They first clash in East Berlin, where Solo spirits out Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) from under Kuryakin's nose, before they learn that they are to team up and work together in order to locate some nuclear warheads about to be sold to Neo-Nazis in Italy. The warheads are in the possession of Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), so the two men and Gaby go under cover, in an effort to find out their location.
The story is thin and feels like the kind of thing that did happen in the 1960s tv series upon which this is based, but there are some factors which make the film a pleasing watch despite this. While Cavill has shown the ability to carry a film in the right role (one where he flies and wears a big red S on his chest), he's never shown any sign of a sense of humour before now, but his Solo is a witty bad boy who hides that beneath a smooth veneer, impeccable taste and great manners. He has chemistry with Hammer's Kuryakin, who deals with anger issues through violence. He in turn has a few good scenes with Vikander's Gaby.
Ritchie has always been great with style. He understands framing and editing, his sense of rhythm is excellent, and his films always look wonderful. And here that facility is at its fullest expression; he makes '60s Italy look a shining wonderland. He seems to have cast his leads because they all look so good together (this applies to Elizabeth Debicki as the villainess too), and they are all beautifully dressed throughout, captured by some divine John Mathieson cinematography. It seems to nod to some '60s spy capers too, and the breezy, often-quirky approach is only bolstered by Daniel Pemberton's fabulous score, full of period touches, and very reminiscent of David Holmes' work for Soderbergh.
Yes it's fantastically empty, but then so are most action blockbusters, and at least this one doesn't pretend to be serious by being solemn. Instead, Ritchie amps up the style. He's not even really interested in the action scenes. He shoots a speed-boat confrontation between Kuryakin and some goons as glimpsed occasionally in the background as his camera lingers on Solo, who has broken into a lorry and sits in the drivers seat eating a sandwich and drinking wine. Another one he fragments into a dizzying series of split-screens, before melding two back together. Another takes place utterly offscreen. And yet it entertains: it is funny, cool, exciting.
Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was always going to have to work exceptionally hard to win me over, seeing as it was not Stephen Soderbergh's The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which had always sounded like just my kind of thing.
Ritchie must have liked the sound of that project too, because his movie takes much of its style and approach straight from Soderbergh's "Oceans" movies, most particularly the misunderstood oddball masterpiece at the midpoint in the trilogy, Oceans Twelve.
This is an origin story, detailing the first encounter between 1960s spies from different sides of the Iron curtain. We have suave, confident CIA man Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill, assured) and stubborn, man-mountain KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). They first clash in East Berlin, where Solo spirits out Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) from under Kuryakin's nose, before they learn that they are to team up and work together in order to locate some nuclear warheads about to be sold to Neo-Nazis in Italy. The warheads are in the possession of Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), so the two men and Gaby go under cover, in an effort to find out their location.
The story is thin and feels like the kind of thing that did happen in the 1960s tv series upon which this is based, but there are some factors which make the film a pleasing watch despite this. While Cavill has shown the ability to carry a film in the right role (one where he flies and wears a big red S on his chest), he's never shown any sign of a sense of humour before now, but his Solo is a witty bad boy who hides that beneath a smooth veneer, impeccable taste and great manners. He has chemistry with Hammer's Kuryakin, who deals with anger issues through violence. He in turn has a few good scenes with Vikander's Gaby.
Ritchie has always been great with style. He understands framing and editing, his sense of rhythm is excellent, and his films always look wonderful. And here that facility is at its fullest expression; he makes '60s Italy look a shining wonderland. He seems to have cast his leads because they all look so good together (this applies to Elizabeth Debicki as the villainess too), and they are all beautifully dressed throughout, captured by some divine John Mathieson cinematography. It seems to nod to some '60s spy capers too, and the breezy, often-quirky approach is only bolstered by Daniel Pemberton's fabulous score, full of period touches, and very reminiscent of David Holmes' work for Soderbergh.
Yes it's fantastically empty, but then so are most action blockbusters, and at least this one doesn't pretend to be serious by being solemn. Instead, Ritchie amps up the style. He's not even really interested in the action scenes. He shoots a speed-boat confrontation between Kuryakin and some goons as glimpsed occasionally in the background as his camera lingers on Solo, who has broken into a lorry and sits in the drivers seat eating a sandwich and drinking wine. Another one he fragments into a dizzying series of split-screens, before melding two back together. Another takes place utterly offscreen. And yet it entertains: it is funny, cool, exciting.
Saturday, 15 June 2013
MAN OF STEEL
(Zack Snyder, 2013)
I could make a solid argument that Alan Moore's Miracleman is the most influential Superhero story of the last 40 years or so. Every "revisionist" story that followed - including Moore's own Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns - was influenced by the approach Moore took in Miracleman, where he explores what it would be really like if an actual superhuman being existed in the real world. Moore is an intelligent writer, and he investigates this idea quite thoroughly in the series, especially the incredible final issue. But he is also a great writer of genre stories, and Miracleman includes Nazi scientists and alien races, and incredible battles between superheroes. This is perhaps the aspect of the series which has permeated the comics mainstream most in the decades since Moore wrote his stories in the 1980s. He creates one particular issue in which two beings with superstrength brawl in the streets of and skies above London. They punch each other through walls, as superheroes had been doing in the Marvel and DC universes for decades. But Moore thinks about the consequences. Here, they destroy half of the city. Thousands are killed as buildings crumble and concrete shatters. The story, while tremendously exciting, even exhilarating, is also sickening in the scale of its violence.
Watching the third act of Man of Steel, that Miracleman story was the first thing that came to mind.
Critics generally dislike superhero movies. The genre is seen, and not without reason, as catering to the lowest common denominator of summer audiences, following formulas and overusing cgi in pursuit of overly familiar story arcs and character stereotypes. Critics certainly don't take superhero movies seriously, and when a filmmaker does - like Christopher Nolan, in his Batman trilogy - he gets slammed for his presumption and ambition.
Well, Christopher Nolan produced Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and it somewhat resembles his Batman films in its tone of brooding moral seriousness, and in the massive scale of its action. The aim here is to make a Superman film for a modern audience, which means losing some of the joy and wonder which are undeniably a part of the Superman mythos; this is Superman stripped of some of the apple pie sweetness crucial to the appeal of the classic reading of the character.
But then, as a character, Superman is great enough to withstand multiple readings and variations. Snyder and writer David Goyer - also familiar from Nolan's Batman films, and the Blade trilogy in addition - streamline and excise in order to find the character best suited to the tone they are working in. They also work extremely hard to avoid the problems that so many superhero films encounter - lets call it origin story syndrome. Oh, this is an origin story, but they get Clark into the red and blue outfit relatively early on, then follow a non-linear path through their story.
There are roughly three different sections. It starts off, as Richard Donner's Superman The Movie did, on Krypton, where Superman's biological father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is desperate to get his newborn son Kal- El off the planet before it is destroyed. At the same time, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is organising a coup, and we see the clash of wills and philosophies between the two. Zod kills Jor-El and is imprisoned, but not before promising to find Kal El, escaped across the stars. Krypton is visualised as a prog rock sci-fi rock planet, studied with ornate metal skyscrapers, roamed by lizard creatures on foot and by wing, and both Crowe and Shannon do solid work in this section, the strength of which establishes Man of Steel as more of a science fiction film than a superhero one.
When it gets to earth, Snyder skips around. Borrowing some tone and imagery from Terrence Malick, we see Clark as a little boy in Kansas and as a lone drifter across North America as an adult, and the best scenes in the film are mostly in this section, many of them focusing on his relationship with the human parents who found and raised him, Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). Costner is especially good here, those old Gary Cooper comparisons making sense again for the first time in years as he presents a father filled with fear for his son the God, and what his powers might mean for him as a person. What they mean for him as a child is pain; unable to handle the sensory overload created by x-ray vision and super-hearing, unable ever to use or even hint at his immense strength against the bullies who torment him, young Clark is a mess.
Henry Cavill does a good job with the adult version of that character, presenting him as conflicted about himself and his place in the world and yet as essentially good. He is the product of the Kents, utterly American; modest, serious, full of integrity. Cavill is brilliantly cast - Superman should have the sort of square-jawed but bland handsomeness he possesses, he should project strength but never seem all that interesting, he should carry a hint of melancholy at the immense burden his isolation forces him to bear. Cavill does all this, and he makes the emotional scenes work. We sympathise with his god, because his problems are so human.
Those problems arrive with the coming of Zod and his followers to Earth, ushering in the third - and worst - section of the film. Thats not to say it's bad, exactly. There are a few early thrills once Clark is in the familiar costume. The first time he flies and finds himself rocketing, whooping, above the earth.
The moment after his first battle with the Kryptonians when a squad of soldiers lower their guns in a sort of quiet awe. The way Snyder defiantly has him assume a Christ pose as he floats momentarily in space. But most of that final section is devoted to destruction. Snyder embraces post-9/11 disaster porn imagery with an enthusiasm that would embarrass Michael Bay. He does it very well, orchestrating some really impressive visuals and a few fun genre moments amidst all the numbing chaos. But it is hard to forget that while Superman is punching villains in the face - this film has more punching in it than most boxing films manage - thousands of innocents are probably dying as cities topple and explode around them. This is where Miracleman is relevant.
It also raises the issue of the essential characterisation of Superman. It is one thing to dispose of some of the mythology - and by the end, it is clear that that has only been tweaked - but another to change what is quintessential to how the character works. Superman helps others. He saves people. He does not kill, he does not let them die. That is an issue I can see troubling many fans of the character, and explanations about how this is a story of him as a rookie don't really suffice as an explanation.
It seems odd to criticise this film for having too much action when the worst thing about the Christopher Reeve Superman films is that they don't have enough - though they have not aged all that well in other ways - but it isn't the quantity of the action here, its the repetitive nature of much of it. Snyder makes some smart choices with the shooting. He mainly sticks to a single camera, keeps the editing quick and only lets it slip into incoherence to suggest the figures are moving too fast and hitting too hard for the human eye to follow. But he omits some of his better known stylistic tics like speed ramping and hyper slo-mo when they would have worked beautifully with this material, and the result is a movie that feels a little like he is trying to be somebody else; a little bit Christopher Nolan, a little Terrence Malick, a bit Michael Bay.
That is the thing with Snyder - he is one of those modern directors with such a confident, dazzling sense of his own talent that you do feel as if he could so almost anything. He gets so much so right - he textures scenes brilliantly, his pacing is faultless, and he has a painterly sense of colour and composition, all of it edited to within an inch of its life. Yet there is something frustratingly off about his sensibility, for me, something almost ineffable. It all seems entirely obvious, artificial, perhaps even soulless.
So Man of Steel ends as a massive cgi slugfest, and after that rather dazzling - and surprisingly emotionally effecting - first hour that comes as a bit of a disappointment. But it is still mostly satisfying, brilliantly made and nicely acted, and finds a way to make Superman work in the modern world. Credit for that must go to Snyder, Goyer and the cast, but also to Hans Zimmer, whose bombastic score is rousing enough that I never missed the singular genius of John Williams work for the character.
I could make a solid argument that Alan Moore's Miracleman is the most influential Superhero story of the last 40 years or so. Every "revisionist" story that followed - including Moore's own Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns - was influenced by the approach Moore took in Miracleman, where he explores what it would be really like if an actual superhuman being existed in the real world. Moore is an intelligent writer, and he investigates this idea quite thoroughly in the series, especially the incredible final issue. But he is also a great writer of genre stories, and Miracleman includes Nazi scientists and alien races, and incredible battles between superheroes. This is perhaps the aspect of the series which has permeated the comics mainstream most in the decades since Moore wrote his stories in the 1980s. He creates one particular issue in which two beings with superstrength brawl in the streets of and skies above London. They punch each other through walls, as superheroes had been doing in the Marvel and DC universes for decades. But Moore thinks about the consequences. Here, they destroy half of the city. Thousands are killed as buildings crumble and concrete shatters. The story, while tremendously exciting, even exhilarating, is also sickening in the scale of its violence.
Watching the third act of Man of Steel, that Miracleman story was the first thing that came to mind.
Critics generally dislike superhero movies. The genre is seen, and not without reason, as catering to the lowest common denominator of summer audiences, following formulas and overusing cgi in pursuit of overly familiar story arcs and character stereotypes. Critics certainly don't take superhero movies seriously, and when a filmmaker does - like Christopher Nolan, in his Batman trilogy - he gets slammed for his presumption and ambition.
Well, Christopher Nolan produced Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and it somewhat resembles his Batman films in its tone of brooding moral seriousness, and in the massive scale of its action. The aim here is to make a Superman film for a modern audience, which means losing some of the joy and wonder which are undeniably a part of the Superman mythos; this is Superman stripped of some of the apple pie sweetness crucial to the appeal of the classic reading of the character.
But then, as a character, Superman is great enough to withstand multiple readings and variations. Snyder and writer David Goyer - also familiar from Nolan's Batman films, and the Blade trilogy in addition - streamline and excise in order to find the character best suited to the tone they are working in. They also work extremely hard to avoid the problems that so many superhero films encounter - lets call it origin story syndrome. Oh, this is an origin story, but they get Clark into the red and blue outfit relatively early on, then follow a non-linear path through their story.
There are roughly three different sections. It starts off, as Richard Donner's Superman The Movie did, on Krypton, where Superman's biological father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is desperate to get his newborn son Kal- El off the planet before it is destroyed. At the same time, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is organising a coup, and we see the clash of wills and philosophies between the two. Zod kills Jor-El and is imprisoned, but not before promising to find Kal El, escaped across the stars. Krypton is visualised as a prog rock sci-fi rock planet, studied with ornate metal skyscrapers, roamed by lizard creatures on foot and by wing, and both Crowe and Shannon do solid work in this section, the strength of which establishes Man of Steel as more of a science fiction film than a superhero one.
When it gets to earth, Snyder skips around. Borrowing some tone and imagery from Terrence Malick, we see Clark as a little boy in Kansas and as a lone drifter across North America as an adult, and the best scenes in the film are mostly in this section, many of them focusing on his relationship with the human parents who found and raised him, Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). Costner is especially good here, those old Gary Cooper comparisons making sense again for the first time in years as he presents a father filled with fear for his son the God, and what his powers might mean for him as a person. What they mean for him as a child is pain; unable to handle the sensory overload created by x-ray vision and super-hearing, unable ever to use or even hint at his immense strength against the bullies who torment him, young Clark is a mess.
Henry Cavill does a good job with the adult version of that character, presenting him as conflicted about himself and his place in the world and yet as essentially good. He is the product of the Kents, utterly American; modest, serious, full of integrity. Cavill is brilliantly cast - Superman should have the sort of square-jawed but bland handsomeness he possesses, he should project strength but never seem all that interesting, he should carry a hint of melancholy at the immense burden his isolation forces him to bear. Cavill does all this, and he makes the emotional scenes work. We sympathise with his god, because his problems are so human.
Those problems arrive with the coming of Zod and his followers to Earth, ushering in the third - and worst - section of the film. Thats not to say it's bad, exactly. There are a few early thrills once Clark is in the familiar costume. The first time he flies and finds himself rocketing, whooping, above the earth.
The moment after his first battle with the Kryptonians when a squad of soldiers lower their guns in a sort of quiet awe. The way Snyder defiantly has him assume a Christ pose as he floats momentarily in space. But most of that final section is devoted to destruction. Snyder embraces post-9/11 disaster porn imagery with an enthusiasm that would embarrass Michael Bay. He does it very well, orchestrating some really impressive visuals and a few fun genre moments amidst all the numbing chaos. But it is hard to forget that while Superman is punching villains in the face - this film has more punching in it than most boxing films manage - thousands of innocents are probably dying as cities topple and explode around them. This is where Miracleman is relevant.
It also raises the issue of the essential characterisation of Superman. It is one thing to dispose of some of the mythology - and by the end, it is clear that that has only been tweaked - but another to change what is quintessential to how the character works. Superman helps others. He saves people. He does not kill, he does not let them die. That is an issue I can see troubling many fans of the character, and explanations about how this is a story of him as a rookie don't really suffice as an explanation.
It seems odd to criticise this film for having too much action when the worst thing about the Christopher Reeve Superman films is that they don't have enough - though they have not aged all that well in other ways - but it isn't the quantity of the action here, its the repetitive nature of much of it. Snyder makes some smart choices with the shooting. He mainly sticks to a single camera, keeps the editing quick and only lets it slip into incoherence to suggest the figures are moving too fast and hitting too hard for the human eye to follow. But he omits some of his better known stylistic tics like speed ramping and hyper slo-mo when they would have worked beautifully with this material, and the result is a movie that feels a little like he is trying to be somebody else; a little bit Christopher Nolan, a little Terrence Malick, a bit Michael Bay.
That is the thing with Snyder - he is one of those modern directors with such a confident, dazzling sense of his own talent that you do feel as if he could so almost anything. He gets so much so right - he textures scenes brilliantly, his pacing is faultless, and he has a painterly sense of colour and composition, all of it edited to within an inch of its life. Yet there is something frustratingly off about his sensibility, for me, something almost ineffable. It all seems entirely obvious, artificial, perhaps even soulless.
So Man of Steel ends as a massive cgi slugfest, and after that rather dazzling - and surprisingly emotionally effecting - first hour that comes as a bit of a disappointment. But it is still mostly satisfying, brilliantly made and nicely acted, and finds a way to make Superman work in the modern world. Credit for that must go to Snyder, Goyer and the cast, but also to Hans Zimmer, whose bombastic score is rousing enough that I never missed the singular genius of John Williams work for the character.
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
IMMORTALS
(Tarsem Singh, 2011)
This is where modern mainstream cinema has brought us: this bizarre twisting of Greek mythology filtered through a collision between video game narrative (journey, fight, boss fight) and slick advertising imagery, all of it pumped up on steroids and as homoerotic as Tom from Finland. Thankfully that slick advertising imagery is the work of Tarsem Singh, a director with an actual, distinct and individual visual sensibility. His narrative chops are more open to debate, since each of his films so far (confused serial killer thriller The Cell and quite unclassifiable fantasy The Fall) have been problematic as Exercises in storytelling. But he makes each and every frame of Immortals look truly magnificent. The film is a triumph of design; sets, costumes, weaponry; they all look superb and Singh lights and frames all beautifully.
As if to celebrate this, he often resorts to slo-mo, emphasising the aesthetic pleasures to be had in his tableaux. But instead, he just exaggerates the film's airless, constricted beauty, the obviousness that this is a movie fantasy with no relation whatsoever with the real world. This doesn't look, sound or feel like the real world, which makes it's efforts at grittiness - in the violence, in some of the emotional content - almost laughable.
The story is familiar and familiarly ludicrous; evil king Hyperion is conquering all, his scarred, masked troops raping, murdering, pillaging. He's the kind of villain who's so evil, he casually kills his own men at regular intervals. He wants a magic bow in order to free ("unleash" is the term preferred by the script here) the Titans, only Zeus and his family of Gods looking on from Olympus aren't happy about that and so they prod Theseus (Henry Cavill), a blandly efficient Warrior with a grudge, into his path to lead the fight. Along the way Theseus meets and deflowers Phaedra (Freida Pinto), a virgin oracle, and bonds with Stephen Dorffs buff, wisecracking thief.
The script is clunky and often comically earnest as its characters discuss free will and fate while deciding whether or not to involve themselves in the big battle, and the uneven cast doesn't help. Rourke plays it like it's Sophocles, though he cops Brad Pitt's "eat something in every scene" trick, Cavill and Pinto are seemingly involved in a secret contest to see who can be the most beautifully wooden (which doesn't help their scenes together) and much of the rest of the cast seem content to flex their muscles and pout.
Singh puts together a few good action scenes, and it is always quite entertaining in its delirious way, but it's an odd film, memorable more for what it does wrong than what it gets right.
This is where modern mainstream cinema has brought us: this bizarre twisting of Greek mythology filtered through a collision between video game narrative (journey, fight, boss fight) and slick advertising imagery, all of it pumped up on steroids and as homoerotic as Tom from Finland. Thankfully that slick advertising imagery is the work of Tarsem Singh, a director with an actual, distinct and individual visual sensibility. His narrative chops are more open to debate, since each of his films so far (confused serial killer thriller The Cell and quite unclassifiable fantasy The Fall) have been problematic as Exercises in storytelling. But he makes each and every frame of Immortals look truly magnificent. The film is a triumph of design; sets, costumes, weaponry; they all look superb and Singh lights and frames all beautifully.
As if to celebrate this, he often resorts to slo-mo, emphasising the aesthetic pleasures to be had in his tableaux. But instead, he just exaggerates the film's airless, constricted beauty, the obviousness that this is a movie fantasy with no relation whatsoever with the real world. This doesn't look, sound or feel like the real world, which makes it's efforts at grittiness - in the violence, in some of the emotional content - almost laughable.
The story is familiar and familiarly ludicrous; evil king Hyperion is conquering all, his scarred, masked troops raping, murdering, pillaging. He's the kind of villain who's so evil, he casually kills his own men at regular intervals. He wants a magic bow in order to free ("unleash" is the term preferred by the script here) the Titans, only Zeus and his family of Gods looking on from Olympus aren't happy about that and so they prod Theseus (Henry Cavill), a blandly efficient Warrior with a grudge, into his path to lead the fight. Along the way Theseus meets and deflowers Phaedra (Freida Pinto), a virgin oracle, and bonds with Stephen Dorffs buff, wisecracking thief.
The script is clunky and often comically earnest as its characters discuss free will and fate while deciding whether or not to involve themselves in the big battle, and the uneven cast doesn't help. Rourke plays it like it's Sophocles, though he cops Brad Pitt's "eat something in every scene" trick, Cavill and Pinto are seemingly involved in a secret contest to see who can be the most beautifully wooden (which doesn't help their scenes together) and much of the rest of the cast seem content to flex their muscles and pout.
Singh puts together a few good action scenes, and it is always quite entertaining in its delirious way, but it's an odd film, memorable more for what it does wrong than what it gets right.
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