Immortals (Tarsem Singh, 2011)

Dressing up 300's presentation ancient Greek carnage with even more slow-motion, gore and fussy but meaningless art direction, Tarsem Singh's Immortals represents a significant step backward for the director whose long-gestating labor of love, The Fall, made him an instant cult icon. Immortals, sadly, resembles more the director's prior The Cell, a thin, borderline offensive premise made both more alluring and more repellent by Singh's grandiose, immaculate designs. Most of the shots in this film display an intricate control of mise-en-scène, but the florid colors, precise blocking and refreshing use of tactile objects where possible only make it more frustrating that no one apparently stopped to take stock of how awful all those obsessively arranged objects were.

Awkwardly inserting itself between a revisionist exposé of how great but mortal deeds become godlike and an endorsement of supernatural mythology, Immortals never properly finds its footing. Vaguely retelling the story of Theseus (Henry Cavill), the film depicts the mythological hero as a peasant who has honed his fighting skills from childhood under the tutelage of a kind old man (John Hurt) who just might be more than meets the eye. Theseus' village, a stacked network of homes etched into a sheer cliff face near Mount Tartarus, comes under fire by Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), the king of Crete, who seeks to free the Titans caged in the giant mountain to bring about the death of the gods he despises. We soon learn that gods do indeed exist in this world, but despite the threat of unleashing the Titans, they force the humans to fight their battle for them.

This is but the first and most prominent element of the film to make no sense. Zeus (Luke Evans) warns any other god who might think of helping Theseus and the tiny contingent of support the man amasses because "the law" forbids gods to interfere in the affairs of man. Heracles, one of a number of children he made with a human women, is literally standing there when he says this. His daughter, Athena (Isabel Lucas) also mentions Zeus being that old man who coached Theseus from childhood, which the supreme god defends by saying he was in human form, the supernatural equivalent to, "I smoked, but I didn't inhale." There is a point to be made here about the hypocrisy and egomania of the gods, a point the Greeks themselves made in some of their myths, but Singh presents this arbitrary restriction without comment, needing any excuse to ward off the audience asking, "Well why doesn't Zeus just put a lightning bolt up Hyperion's ass and end this now?"

Not much else in the film obeys any logic, internal or otherwise, either. Singh stages a number of swordfights without any grounding in drama, making the hacking and slashing feel more like a video game cutscene than a film. In fact, I kept thinking of the God of War games while I watched CGI bubbles of blood explode out of people slashed with rote button-mashing repetition. Those games not only have a more engaging mythological revisionism, they better capture and critique the unchecked arrogance of the gods. They also give some sense of scale as to the difficulty of killing an immortal, which here seems a matter only of getting the drop on a timeless being. The Titans themselves just look like charred people, and the gods can kill them nothing more than chains and the rod part of Poseidon's trident. If they were this easy to kill, why imprison them in the first place? And why, when the gods have to finally face their old foes, do only six of them show up? This is fate-of-the-world stuff, Hephaestus, maybe get off your ass.

Yes, yes, it's just an action film, and one more visually sophisticated than the usual tat. Singh said he set out to cross Fight Club with Caravaggio, and he largely succeeds. But that artiness privileges the tableaux of the master shots, not the eventual slide into incoherent action scored to what sounds like Hans Zimmer's "braaam" refrain from Inception crossed with an audio recording of a hurricane taken with a cellphone. The climactic battle betrays Singh's flaws when it comes to handling the variables of people, who cannot be so minutely controlled in large numbers and undo all that work he put into the lovely tunnels and caves. By founding his film on prettiness, not humanity, Singh not only prevents any kind of moral connection to the violence but perversely beatifies it. One could justify this as the director canonizing the all-too-real deeds of man into a great mythological event, but even the depictions of torture in this movie are so finely crafted as to revel in the blood.

Immortals does get a few things right, chiefly in that portrayal of ancient Greece not as some utopian place of peace and wisdom but a bloodthirsty place of horrific war and atrocity. Hyperion in particular is, despite the thin reasoning behind his quest to bring about the end of the world (between this and Star Trek, I'm so sick of people taking out the loss of a loved one on an entire planet), frightfully plausible. He plans his subjugation across generations, trying to leave as many descendants as possible not merely to perpetuate his own line but to leave genealogical scars of his conquest in order to gain victory even in death. But Immortals never capitalizes on these brief displays of clarity, soon dropping right back into the saber-rattling, blood-letting glory of war. Then again, its costumery and staging are so absurd that the fights here are more likely to be canonized by Aristophanes than Homer.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a fear du jour-updating reboot of the apes-take-over-Earth franchise, has just enough creativity in it that its problematic whole is all the more frustrating. The only actor who genuinely fits into his role comfortably is animated out of the picture, while a good third of the film feels like padding to establish questionable, simplistic motivation for a primate proletariat revolt. Yet when the film clicks, Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds a surprisingly effective tone between the sentimental and vicious.

Swapping out fears of nuclear holocaust for the less definite disease paranoia, Rise of the Planet of the Apes repositions the root of man's fall as the noble but misguided attempt to alter nature. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist for a pharmaceutical firm who engineers a virus to repair the brain, effectively curing Alzheimer's and other brain-degenerative diseases. It's a lofty goal, and one that doesn't particularly need the addition of Will's Alzheimer's-stricken father (John Lithgow, making the most of an almost unwritten part) to sell the importance of such a breakthrough. But when an aggressive test chimp forces the closure of the research, Will secrets away the ape, Caesar, who inherited his mother's altered genes and exhibits intelligence even beyond that of a young human.

This is a mercifully non-mythologizing setup, and while Rise dallies in getting toward any kind of point, the scenes with young Caesar are entertaining for one simple reason: Andy Serkis. Franco portrays the pain of watching his father slip away with all the deep human agony of watching a meter reader assign a parking ticket, but Andy Serkis, rendered by computer animation, creates a broad emotional spectrum for Caesar's development. Though the CG of the ape bodies is noticeably fake —and is it me or has CGI actually gotten worse of late? — Serkis' wonderful captured facial and body progression through childlike wonder to an increasing sense of discomfort and confinement in the cramped San Francisco house is the most thrilling mo-cap performance since, well, Serkis' last one. When Caesar later becomes a revolutionary, Serkis manages to put righteous fury on a chimp's face, even as he never loses that sense of empathy.

In order to transition from this secluded growth to a full-on revolution, however, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver rely on logic gaps and laughable shortcuts. When the situation of raising a hyper-intelligent but confused and powerful chimp inevitably leads to a sour conclusion, Caesar finds himself in a primate shelter under the mistreatment of a one-note slop-slosher (Tom Felton), who pisses Caesar off into leading an insurrection among the captive apes. This personalization of the rebellion lacks the matching social oppression that made Conquest of the Planet of the Apes more plausible, and I wish the filmmakers had taken a more high-minded approach. Perhaps posit the eventual rebellion as a means of asserting a species' dominance, suggesting that a being capable of great intelligence will not merely carve out a place at the top of the food chain but willfully subjugate other species as conquest. This would be in-keeping with the franchise's slyly satiric exploration into mankind's thirst for supremacy, and at the very least it would offer more thematically rich motivation for a full-on war than "Draco Malfoy sprayed me with a hose."

But then, maybe war isn't really what Caesar wants at all, given how the filmmakers soften him for PG-13 purposes. And therein lies the key issue with the film: it does not appear to know what it wants to say, and because of that the plot starts changing on a whim in the film's second half. The greedy CEO of the pharmaceutical firm (David Oyelowo) does a facile reversal on Will's research solely to allow for a stronger version of the "cure" to be manufactured to both heighten the apes' intelligence further and introduce a human side effect that allows the writers to shift blame for the coming apocalypse away from the poor, misunderstood apes. This adds a number of awkward, disconnected lines that no one even tries to coherently bring together at the end, from the unnecessary second batch of test apes to Caesar's forced mercy. The movie performs such an awkward pivot that it recalls the test-audience-generated ending of the aforementioned Conquest, a film that likewise pulled its punches, at least in the theatrical cut.

Nevertheless, director Rupert Wyatt stages some impressive shots that find a richer balance of the gentle and violent than the script, from a shower of leaves falling in ironic beauty as apes swing menacingly through trees to the clever use of San Franciscan fog in the climax on the Golden Gate Bridge. Furthermore, Caesar's interactions with other apes, from his initial suffering for genetic differences to eventual leadership of enhanced primate warriors, are so transfixing that the fluff that fills the second act no longer feels like tedium when the camera stays in the cage with Caesar after dark. The impressive degree of communication exchanged between these mo-capped actors through body language and grunts makes the long stretches of technically wordless sections as gripping as the action setpieces. A late exchange of looks between Caesar and a fallen comrade attains an ephemeral poignancy that will make you mourn the loss of an ape.

These moments, great and small, offer a tantalizing glimpse into a potentially great film, one that unfortunately gets consumed in bet-hedging and plot-convenient rewrites. And if the film ultimately feels pat and trite, it has enough ideas to make the idea of a sequel more appealing than any other franchise-starter this year, save Captain America. Perhaps, like the retrovirus-exposed apes, the intelligence of the writing will have grown exponentially by then to match the potential.