- Title: Immortal (fr. Immortel Ad Vitam)
- Year: 2004
- Rating: R
- Running Time: 102 mins
- Director: Enki Bilal
- Writer(s): Enki Bilal, Serge Lehman
- Cast: Linda Hardy, Thomas Kretschmann, Charlotte Rampling, Frederic Pierrot, Thomas M. Pollard, Yann Collette, Derrick Brenner, Corinne Jaber, Barbara Weber-Scaff, Joe Sheridan
I’m not sure whether to describe Immortal as an interesting failure, or a film that punches well above its weight. Visually, it is both fantastic and seriously disappointing — often in the same scene. In terms of story, one gets the feeling that surrealism and metaphor are deployed both for overall effect, and because whoever was piloting this particular ship had no real notion of where they were going. The overall impression is of a movie that is smart and dumb at the same time, one that squanders so much that is good because of a couple of wrong choices.
Immortal is a french film that adapts the work of graphic artist Enki Bilal, namely his Nikopol trilogy of comics. I was not familiar with Bilal’s work until seeing Immortal, but the film has certainly piqued my interest — his visual style as expressed here is compelling. From character design to background, Immortal captures the look of what I have seen of Bilal’s art. At its best, Immortal is enormously visually satisfying, with a top-notch effects and artistry creating a future-as-past style metropolis that makes you want to freeze frame just to appreciate it.
Most of the film takes place in ‘The Big Transgenic Apple’ of a futuristic New York. It opens with an Egyptian pyramid floating in the air above the city. Inside, Bast and Anubis converse with Horus — the eagle-headed god, it turns out, is being sentenced to death. With only a week left of life, Horus leaves the pyramid and searches for a host — and someone to impregnate.
Jill will be that someone. A beautiful blue-skinned mutant with strange properties and no memory, she begins the film as a prisoner and quickly ends up as the charge of a helpful scientist. Her only link to her past is a mysterious man completely clothed in black. The third member of our triangle is Nikopol, a man accidentally revived from cryogenic imprisonment who becomes Horus’s host. It is suggested that Nikopol was once some kind of political dissident, since slogans of his appear around the streets in the form of hologrammatic graffiti, but his past is never really clear. He and Jill are forced together by Horus’s will, but end up falling for each other — though both are essentially the rape victims of the god.
Nikopol is sought by the venal senator who runs New York, as well as Eugenics, the big corporation that does all sorts of genetic modifications to wealthy citizens. And the police themselves are tracking Horus, though they don’t know it, who has left a trail of bodies in his wake as he searched for a compatible host. Add in some aliens and mutants, some cops and cronies, and you’ve got your cast. Only problem is, half of the cast are real actors, and the others are bad CGI.
A hammerhead shark-headed mutant sits in a car next to a human. Guess which one is CGI? The human. Despite requiring probably on a slight make-up job for a real actor, the human CGI characters in Immortal look about as compelling as the cut scene animation from an x-box game — whereas the crazy-ass looking mutant in the above scene is in a latex suit! And the mutant actually looks pretty good. Here is the huge problem with Immortal (though not the only one): visual schizophrenia. This movie doesn’t know what it’s supposed to look like, and moves from scenes of amazing visual ingenuity and beauty, to stuff that looks like bad, and at this point very dated, animation. For what is essentially an art house style film that demands to be evaluated in visual terms, such failures have to be counted against it.
I’ve read a theory as to why this was — that Immortal supposedly uses CGI to represent artificiality at a more profound level, a deliberate way to spotlight the human CG characters as something other than normal. But this falls down when you look at who is, and is not, computer generated in the film. Horus and the other gods are the best CGI characters — they look slightly off, but it works since they are gods and not of this world. The human characters, on the other hand, look ridiculous. While the evil senator and his cronies being rendered in CG supports the appaloggia of ‘CGI as metaphor for artificiality,’ as it is assumed these characters have had many surgeries to alter their bodies, all the other stuff does not. Rendering all the cops CG as well as the faceless spear carriers of Eugenics makes no sense, as these are essentially normal people. The unfortunate thing is that most of these CG characters were motion capped around actual actors performing these scenes — so why on earth was the decision made to animate them?
It’s hard to figure out, and a real let down for a film that could otherwise be much more significant and compelling. While scenes between Jill and Nikopol are invested with the emotion of two human beings interacting with each other, much of the rest of the film alienates the viewer. And not in ‘a good way’ either — it is literally difficult to pay attention to the CG scenes, they are that jarring. It is rare to see so much good juxtaposed against so much bad in a film, and I have to wonder what Lucas-like levels of denial and obliviousness must have went on at the top to achieve this.
Beyond the major visual disappointment of the film, it has to be admitted that the plot does not make a great deal of sense. Some of this is fine and achieves the desired effect, as the film is telling a surreal, mythic story that would feel rather pedestrian if it was straight-forward. But there are also lapses in narrative logic, and issues with deliberate vagueness, that really do suggest that the film makers themselves didn’t quite know what it was they were saying. Overall, Immortal is a fairly simple story that tries to suggest it is something much bigger, but fails to hold up to scrutiny or follow-through with so much of what it seems to promise.
However, Immortal does possess some truly compelling imagery, and a real visual flare that leads me to recommend it to anyone that is interested in visually sumptuous and stylistically idiosyncratic film making. The cityscapes alone are worth seeing. And while there is a great deal to criticize about the film much of it has to do with how good Immortal should have been — what remains an essentially likable and entertaining failure could have been a near-classic if it weren’t for questionable choices and a script that is weak in some areas. Still, despite all the teeth gritting, Immortal is a film worth checking out, but only with these caveats in mind.
