Review of Immortal

Introduction

2004 saw a revolution (in airquotes) in the movie industry. A handful of films introduced the digital backlot, films like Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, Casshern, and Sin City the following year, all shot their actors against a green screen and painted in the world in post production. Everyone was raving and celebrating the new wave in cinema, and had conveniently forgotten that Tron had done the same thing over twenty years previously. I`m sure George Lucas would have raised a few objections too, if he didn`t want to point out the plasticity of his Star Wars prequels. Where the real revolution came was in ease and cost. You no longer need expensive supercomputers to create Hollywood level effects, what Sky Captain showed was that you can get a mega-budget look for one-tenth the cost, and what would have taken a team of animators millions of man-hours to achieve could now be accomplished in a fraction of the time. Sky Captain was Hollywood`s bold new venture, while Casshern demonstrated Japanese filmmakers willingness to embrace the new way. Immortal was Europe`s contribution to the new new wave, a Hollywood style comic book adaptation on a French film budget.

Immortal is based on the graphic novels of Enki Bilal, and he also directs. The story is set in New York of 2095, a not altogether unfamiliar world of skyscrapers and flying cars. But hovering over the city is a giant pyramid, Central Park is cordoned off as an Intrusion Zone where people are forbidden, and the population of the city consists of humans, aliens, mutants and freaks. The city`s credo is one of Eugenics, exhorting improvement through science, rather than leaving it to nature. The mysterious pyramid is home to the Ancient Egyptian Gods, who just happen to be visiting the world they created. The story begins when Horus is sentenced to death for rebellion, and is given seven days to live, seven days in which he can explore the world. Meanwhile, a unique girl is found in New York, possessing odd abilities. Jill is not quite human, has blue skin and cries blue tears, and catches the attention of Dr Elma Turner, who hires her to be a guinea pig. At the same time, random chance causes an escape from a cryogenic prison; the man freed is Nikopol, who thirty years earlier advocated a rebellion against society`s trend towards Eugenics. The fates of the God, the mutant and the human are intertwined.

Video

Immortal gets a divine 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer that certainly shows the film at its best. The image is clear and sharp throughout, and there is no sign of print damage or compression artefacts. The green screen technique allows the imagination of the film`s designers to run riot, and Enki Bilal`s graphic novel credentials come through clearly on screen, whether it`s the digital sets or the costume design.

I did mention that New York looks familiar, and it does look as if they have taken the New York of Luc Besson`s Fifth Element, complete with retro flying cars, and passed it through a bleach-bypass process to create a gritty and rundown New York rendered in industrial greys and blues. It looks splendid but it is a touch clichéd. Where the film falls down is in the CGI characters. The story is told with a mix of real actors and CGI, and the computer-generated characters don`t always work. The characters that are supposed to be human, such as the mayor and his aides, as well as the police detectives look and feel fake. It could be that they needed to be rendered in more detail or animated more realistically, but it`s more a perceptual inference that they look `wrong`. Indeed the less human that a digital character looked, the easier he or she was to accept.

Audio

You can choose between DD 5.1 and DD 2.0 English, and the sound design is recreated well on the disc. It is an ambient enveloping track that places you in the world of the future well, and the action is dynamically represented. The dialogue is clear for the most part, and the film has some nice music to accompany it. Unfortunately, while optional English subtitles are provided, they only translate the non-English dialogue. Unless you are fluent in Ancient Egyptian, you`ll need to leave them on. There should have been a complete subtitle track for the film proper.

Features

You get three of the film`s trailers as well as 30 still images in a gallery. In a useful move, the stills are full frame and aren`t obscured by any fancy graphics.

There are two featurettes on this disc, and the first is your usual run of the mill Making Of CGI featurette. This lasts 11 minutes and details how the characters and world were created from the storyboards to the final product, via plenty of wire frame imagery, as well as blokes who should know better dressed in skin tight leotards and with strategically placed ping pong balls.

A little more substantial is the Making Of documentary. This lasts 36 minutes and features interviews with the cast and crew, clips from the film and plenty of behind the scenes footage. Despite sounding identical to a couple thousand other featurettes, this one is actually quite informative and detailed.

Both featurettes are mostly in French and are subtitled for non-English speakers. On occasion the subtitles were cut off the edge of the screen, but this only happened rarely.

Conclusion

Immortal is a graphic novel brought to life on screen, which means that it has a paper thin story buried under gigabytes of beautiful visual imagery. The story is appropriately divine in nature, although it seems more in keeping with Ancient Greek mythology rather than Ancient Egyptian. Horus has a week of celestial immortality left to him, and decides that he should take the opportunity to spread his divine seed. But for that purpose, he requires a rare individual, one of those few, perfect females that can procreate with a God. He also needs a compatible body to inhabit, to serve as his vessel. This is where Jill and Nikopol come in. This takes place against a backdrop of an odd dystopian future, where eugenics is the norm, where corrupt politicians see the escape of Nikopol as a threat, and the ever-hanging presence of the pyramid as an opportunity.

Actually, the story doesn`t really bear much scrutiny. As I said it`s paper thin, and the presentation is highly derivative, with elements of countless other sci-fi movies thrown in. The most obvious parallel is The Fifth Element, with Leeloo`s perfect being mirrored here by the equally naïve Jill. She also has mysterious powers, oddly coloured hair, and a role to play dictated by destiny. Stargate also plays a part, with the Ancient Egyptian connection a familiar one. Here though, we actually see the gods, as opposed to aliens masquerading as gods.

What I enjoyed about Immortal was its sense of a larger universe. There is a rich story background here, tantalising glimpses of the world of the future. There are corrupt politicians busy machinating, as are the doctors who promote eugenics as the way of the future. The questions remain as to just how this world arose, where the menageries of freaks, mutants and aliens came from, just when did the pyramid appear, what do people think of it, and the same goes for the Intrusion Zone around central park. This film asks many questions and even offers one or two intriguing possibilities, but it`s rather unfortunate that it doesn`t really explore them. As such, the subplots of Mayor Allgood and his cronies, the police investigation into the serial killings that herald Horus` arrival, and Dr Elma Turner`s research don`t amount to much.

It`s also here that the film`s weakness becomes apparent. The New York of the future is rendered brilliantly on screen. It is a distinct future world, which while it owes much to The Fifth Element, manages to create a different character for itself. It is an example of what the best CGI can accomplish. Some of the CG characters on the other hand show the exact opposite. The Mayor and his henchmen, Detective Froebe, and other such characters are simply unacceptable as part of this world. They contrast too strongly against the human actors, and the way they are animated leaves much to be desired. Oddly, the least human characters, Horus and the other gods are much easier to accept. It would have been better if the human characters had been cast with real actors, instead of animated, and any oddness to their features be accomplished through make up. As it is, many scenes in this film look as of they are cutscenes from a computer game as opposed to part of a cinematic narrative.

As a comic book adaptation, Immortal succeeds in putting a distinctive and striking vision on screen. However, despite its literary pretensions, it`s best to check the old grey matter at the door and just appreciate its harsh futurism melded with CGI beauty. The story just isn`t that deep. To its credit however, the story is told in a straightforward manner, and never once does tongue stray toward cheek. If a certain recent summer blockbuster left you a little cold, then Immortal could go some significant way to restoring your faith in comic book movies. It`d be best to keep your expectations low though.