Immortal Kombat…
Immortals (2011), dir. Tarsem Singh, w/ Henry Cavill (Theseus), Mickey Rourke (King Hyperion), Stephen Dorff (Stavros), Freida Pinto (Phaedra), Luke Evans/John Hurt (Zeus)
When I saw Hercules (1983), which starred Lou Ferrigno as the Hellenic Beefcake, I remember suggesting to a friend who saw the movie with me. I imagined what the screenwriters meeting must have been like — set in a bar in Rome, a bunch of Italian guys, drinking wine, and trying to recollect what they remembered of the Hercules story. As they had been drinking, the memories were hazy at best, and often jumbled. And so we got a movie in which Hercules’ chief foe is Daedalus (they share nothing in mythology), who serves the forces of science and chaos (I know — huh?), and who was imagined as a woman (the -us ending in Latin, and the -os ending in Greek is a sign that the person in question is a guy; though Daedalus in this movie was hot, I’m not sure you can justify gender bending like that). That movie, as bad as it was, and it was pretty awful, was often unintentionally funny. There was a lot of laughter in the theatre, as people looked on in shocked astonishment at what they saw.
Well, if Hercules was written by a bunch of drunken Italians in a bar, the writing staff for Immortals has to have been on crack. Jumbled as the storyline was in Hercules, it did bear some resemblance to the Greek myth on which it was based. Here the only thing that looked like it was based on the Theseus story was the battle with the Minotaur, especially as that was viewed in commemorative art at the end of the film, where the bas-relief pieces showing Theseus and the Minotaur were modeled on actual art showing that scene.
Here’s what we know of Theseus in the Greek myths: he was a minor hero until 5th c. Athens, which was fast becoming the great city of Greece, realized they had little mythological background. And so, in 475 BCE, the Athenian general, Cimon, dug up the skeleton of a very large man (about 7 feet tall) on an island allied to Athens. Claiming that he had found the remains of the hero, Theseus, he brought the remains back to Athens, and during the burst of artistic activity in Athens of the 5th c., a lot of stories were developed about Theseus, how he was born to an unwed mother in the Peloponnese, and set out for Athens in the north to find his father, armed with a sword his father had buried. On the way he encountered 6 monsters or wild animals whom he had to defeat, making the roadways from Athens safe for travelers (if this sounds like the Labors of Hercules, it should — these stories were developed to make Theseus into Hercules Jr. — one of the labors even involved Theseus defeating a monstrous opponent who wielded a great bronze club — Theseus, then, had a club, just like Hercules). Once he got to Athens, he was almost poisoned by his evil stepmother, Medea, who knew who he was and didn’t want any challengers to the throne she saw as belonging to her sons with Aegeus. At the last minute, Theseus was saved when Aegeus recognized the sword and dashed his son’s cup to the ground. Theseus then went to deal with the Minotaur problem. Athens was a client state of King Minos of Crete and was obliged to send 14 hostages every few years to Minos. These hostages, 7 young men and young women, were sent as human sacrifices to the monstrous Minotaur. Theseus, managing to get one of the spots in the next group, got to Crete where the king’s daughter, Ariadne, who fell in love with Theseus, helped him defeat the Minotaur.
There were no other big adventures for Theseus — unless you include the ill-fated trip to the Underworld he took with his friend Pirithous — they had gone to kidnap Persephone, the queen of the Underworld, to be Pirithous’ bride, and his accompanying Hercules to fight the Amazons. For the Athenians of the 5th c., he was considered to be the ideal ruler. He was just and rational and ruled the Athenians well. There were some problems in his personal life, and he did die in exile. Homer, who in his Iliad and Odyssey mentions many of the heroes of the generation prior to the Trojan War, never mentions Theseus, though he does mention Pirithous, which supports the idea that in Homer’s day, Athens was no great town, and it had no great mythology — that all came later.
Well, this movie seems to have spent no time in actually researching the myths about Theseus. There was some understanding that he fought a creature called the Minotaur, and that that fight took place in a place called the Labyrinth, but there was no care taken to learn the details of that battle and place. Here, Theseus is a poor man (but with an excellent physique and teeth — not typical of the poor of the ancient world), the son of an unmarried woman, who is also a priestess of some sort at the local temple (called the Labyrinth). They live in a town called Kolpos, which is cut out of a rock cliff, rather like some of the Native American towns in the American Southwest. There is no indication of vegetation of any sort — so where does the food come from? The entire landscape of the film, aside from the brief shots of Mt. Olympus, look like the landscape of the moon (if the moon had seas) — it’s all barren, flat, plateaus, with cities either carved in the side of the hills, or at the foot of mountains. I often tell my class, in discussing Greek and Roman outlooks on life, that location matters. Italy is like Southern California, lush and bountiful, and the Romans are generally optimistic, where Greece is more like Utah, or some other rather barren location, and so the Greeks emphasize their toughness, and the precariousness of human existence. But the setting of this film makes Utah look like California — no one could live in the places set out in this film.
And what’s with the whole skepticism of the gods? Just like Clash of the Titans that came out a few years ago, the main male characters are all skeptical of the existence of gods. One of the characters, a thief, Stavros, explains his disbelief in the gods as stemming from his youth. He prayed for a pony but didn’t get one. Finally, he figured only by stealing one would he get one, and so he did steal a horse, and set out on his life of thievery. Later, when he actually sees some gods, Stavros finally comes to believe, even concluding that the horses the gods give him and Theseus are the answer to his childhood prayer. Theseus too is skeptical of the gods — noting that his mother was a faithful woman, but was still killed, he figures the gods do not exist, or, if they do, they do nothing and are useless.
And, it is with good reason that these Greeks might be skeptical. Zeus, at one point, lays out his terms to the gods — none of the gods are to get involved in human affairs. When asked about human belief in the gods by Athena, Zeus responds that the reason for his policy is that he wants to have faith in humans to solve their own troubles. I like the sentiment, but it still seemed not well thought out.
Instead of the usual story about Theseus, this film involves Theseus having to take arms against the murderous King Hyperion, who wants a magical bow with which he can conquer the world (mad-scientist laugh optional). Of course, Theseus finds the bow, but almost immediately loses it so that Hyperion gets it. Rule No. 1 for heroes — keep track of your stuff! And Hyperion uses the bow to release the Titans who are all imprisoned in a cube in Mt. Tartarus (I know Tartarus isn’t a mountain, nor is anyone imprisoned in a cube in Greek myth), which brings the gods finally to get involved. And the battle scenes with the gods are pretty stunning visually — but still rather conventional. I thought for a moment I was looking at the video game Mortal Kombat and was expecting the words “Finish Him!” to appear on the screen when one of the gods was about to be killed by the Titans (yes the gods can die here — what’s the whole “immortal” thing, if the gods are going to die?). This final battle scene began in a human settlement at the foot of the mountain that looked like Helms Deep in The Two Towers — I was wondering if Peter Jackson has sicked his attorneys on the makers of this turkey…
Roger Ebert in his review of this film for the Chicago Sun-Times said that this was the best looking really bad film he’d seen. I can second that — lots of time and effort went into CGI, matte painting and set design. That time could have gone into the script, or into getting the actors to be able to deliver lines in such a way that we care about them. Unfortunately, the makers of this film figured that all the eye candy would be enough to distract us from the lack of plot and dialog. More unfortunately, they were wrong.
One last point — I know it’s petty of me to make this comment, but I can’t help it — thanks to the good Sisters at St. Peter’s School, in Dorchester, MA. The film opens with some women dressed in red gowns. They are virgin priestesses who have prophetic powers. They live in a building called the Sibelline Monastery. First — there were no monasteries in Greece or Italy until Christianity took hold; second, the monastery looks like a medieval monastery might look; third, the prophetess known as the Sibyl (“y” not “e”) is mainly associated with Italy and not Greece, and so you have a group of women living in a religious community (not in the ancient Greek world), in a monastery that looks like a medieval construction, and with their very name misspelled. And that’s how the movie began. When I saw that at the start of the film, I mouthed “Oh, my God” to myself, and knew I was in for some tough times, tough times which were not alleviated by laughter as in Lou Ferrigno’s Hercules. I’m not a praying man, but if I were, I’d pray most fervently, “No sequel, please!”
