Immortals

It was a nice warm day in Los Angeles yesterday, so I did something not unusual on a day off from work.

I took a book over to the Century City shopping center, sat outside reading in the sun, then ducked into the movie theater for a show.

The book was a brand new translation of The Iliad by Stephen Mitchell. It places an emphasis on accessibility and flow rather than strict fidelity to sources that are questionable anyway.

As a consequence, it’s a delight to read.

My pulse actually pounded as I read of Achilles’ fateful split with Agamemnon, Odysseus’ repeated demonstrations that he is a clever bastard, and Hector’s gradual approach toward a climactic fight with an adversary he simply can not overcome.

Then it was time to see the movie: Immortals, directed by Tarsem Singh, the heavy-on-visuals auteur behind The Cell and The Fall, as well as some lavish music videos and commercials. He’s about a third of a Kubrick, which means he has a better eye for visuals than almost anyone else out there right now.

The writers are a couple of newbies, a pair of Greek brothers who refashioned old myths into cinematic shape.

So how do they stack up against Homer?

Um, not too well.

Henry Cavill plays Theseus, a handsome but stupid peasant who spends much of his time chopping wood shirtless. He’s a favorite of Zeus on account of his tremendous courage, though how that courage has been demonstrated chopping wood is unclear.

Our story gets rolling when the dastardly King Hyperion rolls into town with an army of Cretans, intent on getting his hands on the Bow of Epirus, a magical weapon capable of freeing the ultra-powerful Titans, who are caged beneath the earth after losing a prehistoric battle against the Olympian gods.

Because naturally a magic bow is what you want to free people from a magic prison.

Don’t you know anything?

The only person who can stop Hyperion – played by a satisfactorily growling Mickey Rourke – is the wood chopper himself, Theseus. First, Theseus tries to keep the bow hidden from Hyperion by escaping with Freida Pinto’s oracular Phaedra, the only person who knows where the bow is.

Failing this, he tries to run off with the bow himself, but he gets knocked on the head by one of Hyperion’s soldiers, and Hyperion gets the bow instead.

So Theseus runs to the walled palace where the nefarious Titans are housed and organizes a defense against the approaching Cretans.

This defense doesn’t work too well – maybe because Theseus’ rousing speech to the defenders was so cliché-ridden – so Hyperion gets to fire off a magic arrow at the magic prison, and voila, Titans are running around.

The movie climaxes in a predictable and drab action finale, wherein the Olympian gods take on the Titans while Theseus tracks down Hyperion to engage him in fisticuffs.

Immortals has its visual treats, but whenever the movie slowed down for a dialogue scene between two characters, I slipped into the lighted hallway to read a couple pages of The Iliad. I kept an ear on the movie’s dialogue, just to make sure I didn’t miss any plot points (I didn’t), but there’s not a single memorable line – or action, for that matter – in the entirety of the film.

By contrast, everything that happens in The Iliad seems monumentally important, driving toward a fated climax that encapsulates the grandeur and sadness of the human condition itself.

For all her beauty, Helen is doomed to unhappiness. For all Hector’s nobility, he is doomed to die. For all Odysseus’ smarts, he is slated for a long, long trip home.

Great stories like this are so unthinkably difficult to compose that we still retranslate epic poems that are three thousand years old. We do so because great stories are just that awesome, and there are never enough of them to go around.

And Immortals certainly isn’t adding to their number.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 28/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 24/100