Film Rant: Immortal

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

W. T. F.

This film has to be, without a doubt, the single most f&$%ed up film I have ever seen. Don't get me wrong. It's a good film...I think. But man, if you're looking for a film that you can watch casually, is this ever not it.

The plot --- as near as I can gather --- is that in 2095 a floating pyramid appears above New York City, which is the home to a bunch of Egyptian gods. They're there to test the god Horus because of "his rebellious nature" or something. As far as I can tell this "test" consists of beginning a new line of humans with divine ancestry --- i.e., get a woman pregnant. If he fails to get this accomplished within one week, he loses his immortality (hence the title, I guess). The woman for the job turns out to be a "mutant" individual named Jill, who has white skin, blue hair, blue tears, and blue...*er...let's just say she has a topless scene. This woman has her own set of problems, namely "becoming human," at the prompting of both the doctor researching her and what is apparently another extradimensional being, "John." Finally, we have an "accidentally" escaped convict (Nikopol --- and he actually has a good excuse), whom Horus picks as the vector for the "divine seed." There's also a bunch of side-story with some politicians and corporate heads that don't really come to anything (unless the point was to show the pointlessness of their actions? I don't know).

One of the things that has me liking this film regardless of it's "WTF" nature is the number of unrelated elements they jam into it. You have a transhuman New York City, filled with wildly divergent "mutants" and natural human "rebels." Add what was apparently an extraterrestrial invasion about a decade prior to the film, by a race called the Dahak. Add *John to the mix, whose origins (or, indeed, mere presence) are never explained outright, and the fact that he's responsible for turning Central Park into some sort of extradimensional gateway called Intrusion. Finally, give the finger to suspension of disbelief altogether and throw in a floating pyramid and the gods of Egypt. Facetious tone aside, I love this kind of thing.

There is also, however, a distinct element of rape at one point that kind of threw me out of the film for a while during my first viewing. I watched it again with my roommate because she had wanted to see the film too; it was a little less disturbing then, and my roommate seemed fine with it, so...*shrugs* I guess I can see what it does for the film. Still a little unconfortable.

One thing it does do, though, and this is another thing I liked about the film, is that it helps properly convey that Horus is untouchable. Throughout the entire film, Horus is never harmed, and never held accountable for anything he does. At one point Nikopol is even treating him as a punching bag, and Horus tells him that it's good to let out his anger that way, "even if I can't feel it." It's a small thing, but if a film is depicting something it labels a deity, it's nice if that deity actually seems invulnerable.

The one element that had me the most confused while watching the film, and for most of the day afterwards, was the way they used CGI characters. About half the cast is represented by almost-decent CGI, and nearly all of these cast members could just as easily been represented by someone in face makeup and/or prosthesis. In fact, about half of them could've been represented with no face makeup or prosthesis whatsoever. This baffled me. Early in my first viewing I figured it must be for budgetary reasons, only being able to afford half a cast or something. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this couldn't be it. Voice actors couldn't be that much cheaper than live actors, especially when you'd have to do the CGI anyways, and especially when you'd have to integrate that CGI with live footage for half the characters' appearances. As if to drive it all home, they even used live-action extras in one or two scenes, which is not the sort of thing I'd expect from a film resorting to CGI due to budgetary *concerns.

The only explaination I can come up with --- and it's a really cool reason if it's true --- is that it was an artistic choice. Everyone represented with CGI in the film was "unnatural" in some way. All the humans represented with CGI were either "mutants" as the film defined them, or had been "improved" through cosmetic biological engineering. This produces an interesting effect, as the CGI characters just look wrong when you look at them, especially in direct comparison to live actors. They had me fooled exactly once at the beginning of the film, because I wasn't expecting CGI cast members. Even then, within a few seconds of seeing the person my mind pegged him as "wrong" in relation to the picture; the next close-up confirmed that I wasn't looking at a real actor. If the purpose of the makers of this film had been to use the CGI to show the altered humans --- regardless of how unaltered they looked on the outside --- as "unnatural" in a visual way, then I applaud them both for an ingenious concept and a job well executed.

This doesn't just apply to the humans, either. The gods had to be represented with CGI for obvious reasons, but they, too, would fit the "CGI = unnatural" paradigm. The Dahak shown towards the end of the film, again, had to be represented with CGI, but also fits with "which of these things doesn't belong." They actually took that one step further earlier than that with a human-Dahak hybrid, for which they used a guy in a rubbery suit, and which looked FAKE AS HELL. But it fits, because they even call it a "fake Dahak" in the film, and looks just as unnatural in comparison to the real Dahak as the CGI humans look in comparison to the live actors. The one "unnatural" person in the entire film who isn't represented via CGI is Jill, which given this paradigm and the fact that her origins are never clear makes one wonder just how "unnatural" she really is.