Reader Recommends: Immortal (ad vitam) (2004)

In my efforts to somehow catch up to all my recommendations, I picked a film sent in my twitter user @MAJikMARCer. He said I should watch Immortal (ad vitam). It caught my attention because the IMDB pages talks about it being the year 2095 and a huge floating pyramid space ship filled with real Egyptian gods shows up over New York City. Who wouldn't want to see a movie with that description?! There's also a pretty good looking woman with blue hair and face paint on the cover. That's not too bad either. Are you curious now? Hear all about it after the jump!


The story starts off as the Pyramid space ship comes in over New York. Inside we see Anubis (the jackal) and Bastet (the cat) awaken Horus (the eagle) from death. He has 7 days to explore the world, the length of one heartbeat of a god, before he becomes mortal again and must return to his death-sleep. He is in search of a special woman, a woman with blue hair and pure white skin. She apparently has a special power that even she is unaware of, the ability to procreate with a god.

This movie immediately reminded me of MirrorMask because it had such a stylized and odd look to it. If you mashed MirrorMask together with Fifth Element, you'd probably get something like this. Almost the entire film is done in CG, except for a few characters. The backgrounds are all CG, the vehicles are all CG, the city is CG, even most of the people and extras are CG. There are several extras that are real if you look for them, but the most important 3 main characters are the most noticeable real human actors.

The CG eagle-headed Horus speaks casually with his human host Nicopol

Jill, played by Linda Hardy, is our mysterious blue haired woman, and what I thought were blue face paint markings on her face turned out to be her weird blue tears. She has no memory of who or what she is. Nicopol, played by Thomas Kretschmann, is an escaped prisoner who was sentenced to 30 years deep freeze for starting a conflict against genetic manipulation. Lastly we have Elma Turner, played by Charlotte Rampling, who notices Jill being brought in after she's been arrested. Elma is a doctor of sorts and wants to study Jill, with Jill's consent.

Okay, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty. While the concept is good on paper, and actually it started on paper as a comicbook done by the director, the film didn't really live up to what I had hoped it would be. The CG was really pretty sub-par and dated being from 2004, and not only looks out of place, but it's not animated very well either. I couldn't tell if some of the choices were done on purpose, like how Horus' mouth never moved when he spoke, but his throat did, or if it was just plain bad, like the attempted rendering of human people along side the real people. Lets not even get started on the non-human people in the movie.

So long as you can take the look of the CG and the way it is being animated around the screen as part of the "style" of the film, then you won't have much trouble with it. Unfortunately, while MirrorMask came across to me more as a style, the vast majority of the CG here just came across as the result of dated technology showing it's age.

There were parts of the movie I liked, it's just that there is so much CG that it's hard to get past. I liked the character and discussions about Jill and what she was, and the idea of the Egyptian gods being real and coming back to see how we've been doing is cool. I really loved the cute scenes of Anubis and Bastet passing the time waiting for Horus to come back by learning to play Monopoly and card games. The idea of a populas that has become obsessed with genetic modification is also kinda cool and creepy. Especially to the weird extent that you see in some of the people in the movie. There's also this weird vortex or gate of some kind in Central Park that seems to kill anyone that gets too close. Sadly that wasn't ever really explained.

This leads me to my next point. The story and some of the plot aspects were never really fully explained. I never felt I had a solid grasp on what was going on. They talk about a rebellion, and a giant genetics company, and some kind of monsters that are like red sharks, but they never go into them enough, or at all in some cases. These things are just mentioned in passing, and then maybe you never hear about them again, but it has a direct effect on the plot. For example, in one scene she holds out her hand, and suddenly she shoots energy out of her hand. The other person in the scene doesn't seem surprised, but I was left thinking "since when could she do that?!" So while I could tell what was going on, I just felt I never had enough of the fine details to make it really work.

Linda Hardy was Miss France 1992, now she's blue and gets topless many times

This is a tough movie. I think it's one of those films that lives up better in your memory, or when just talking about it with friends, than it does actually watching it. It's sad to say, but the extensive CG work that is the bulk of the film, to put it bluntly, is just bad. The story, script and acting and things like that just aren't as strong as they need to be either. It has a very unique and interesting concept, but the film just doesn't live up to the potential.

Even though I say these negative things though, I'm certain there are people out there who can see past the surface flaws like the dated CG and enjoy it for what it is. While MirrorMask was like that for me, this could be that movie for you. It's your call if you want to give this... interesting... film a chance. Once again I'd like to thank Marc for his recommendation, it was definitely like nothing I've ever seen before.