The “gobsmacking” epic Roger Ebert called the “best-looking awful movie you will ever see”
There are good movies, bad movies, mediocre movies, OK movies, and crushingly disappointing movies, and Roger Ebert saw them all. He wasn’t often caught in two minds, but he was when he laid his eyes upon a visual feast that served as the backdrop to an absolute narrative nothingburger.
To be honest, it’s fucking annoying when that happens, and we’ve all been there. You’re watching a film that’s nothing short of sumptuous on a visual level, packed with eye-popping vistas, impressive special effects, and stunning costume design, which is utterly wasted on a story you don’t give a shit about.
While the aesthetics fall largely on the director, you’ve got to wonder how a filmmaker has devised such immaculate shot composition, worked with the behind-the-scenes crew to craft a cinematic spectacle, and then either forgot or not even bothered to make anything else about the production interesting.
You could say that about more than one of Tarsem Singh’s efforts, though, with Ebert stuck between a rock and a hard place when he watched the auteur’s 2011 historical epic. “Immortals is without a doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see,” he wrote, giving it a solitary star. “Eiko Ishioka’s costume designs alone deserve an Oscar nomination.”
They didn’t get one, but he wasn’t alone in thinking they should have. Henry Cavill, who’s never been regarded as a leading man with a great deal of range, hacks and slashes his way to saving ancient Greece from Mickey Rourke’s King Hyperion, who wants to lay waste to the land and slay the gods.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about Immortals, and it’s probably best if you switch your brain off, sit back, and bask in its splendour. Ebert is right; it’s a fucking beautiful thing to look at, it’s just a shame that it not only arrived when the blockbuster historical epic boom had long since reached its peak, but it wasn’t even one of the better ones, which says a lot.
“One image after another is gobsmacking,” he marvelled. “You look at these visuals and drink them in.” You may as well, since the movie doesn’t have any meat on its bones. Speaking of which, Ebert accurately noted that it “makes next to no sense,” he described the battle scenes as “interminable and incomprehensible,” which is also correct, and found himself increasingly lost.
“A lot of the time, I had no idea what was going on,” he admitted. “Characters would turn up for the first time, seem terrifically important, and disappear. If at many moments I had stopped the film and asked anybody around me, ‘Who is that, and what are they doing, and why?’, I think they’d have been stuck for an answer.”
Immortals did earn almost a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office, so perhaps Ebert could take some solace that the film he called the best-looking awful movie you will ever see was, in fact, seen by an awful lot of people.
