I have never watched such a confusing movie in my entire life. Immortal is a mess.
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A mysterious woman who has blue hair and blue tears is found to be unlike any other human. The inside of her body resembles that of a person born just three months ago. We don’t really know what any of that means, or why it is important, but that’s what most of this movie is like.
About 15 minutes into the movie the main heroine, Jill, utters the line, “I’m confused,” and I had to say, “You and me both, sister.”
Immortal is a mash-up of live actors, CGI characters, and even a few old-fashioned puppets. What’s confusing is there’s no rhyme or reason to why the movie was filmed like this. You get the feeling that they could only afford live actors for the main parts. It wouldn’t be so bad if the CGI characters were actually created well, but here they are bad representations of people from video games. Their faces have little to no expression and their lips move only slightly, and never in sync with the dialogue they are speaking.
The story is just as incoherent as the animation. Egyptian gods are floating high above New York City in a hovering pyramid. The god Horus has been sent down to Earth, for reasons that are still entirely unknown to me. Horus and the other Egyptian gods are created out of the same awful CGI. Couldn’t they have hired real actors and put them in costumes? The animation is amateur at best.
As if more confusion was needed, at one point we get a glimpse of two of the gods playing Monopoly inside the floating pyramid. Why are they playing Monopoly? We have no idea. But it gave me the idea that a four-hour Monopoly game would be more exciting than this movie.
The plot moves along at a snail's pace, never really revealing anything at all. There are so many unanswered questions left at the end that you’ll feel like you just wasted 102 minutes of your life.
Article comments
1 - Alexandros
As a fan of Bilal's work in general, I do agree that viewers who watch Immortal for the first time are likely to be very, very confused.
A little bit of background... Horus (in Bilal's version at least) created humans as a kind of project. Although he is a god, his immortality is coming to an end. By his sense of time, a span of 7 Earth days is equivalent to a single heartbeat.
The only way he can continue as a god is to procreate with a special being (not a human, but a being who is quite unlike any other - a rare species of woman who can actuall procreate with a god and bear the fruit of that union). Horus's time on Earth is therefore limited and he is searching for the special woman (the blue haired woman). She has been brought to Earth by the mysterious alien called John who has built an "Intrusion zone" smack in the middle of Central Park.
Horus, in the meantime, needs a human body he can inhabit, to use as a vehicle to procreate with Jill. After several rejections (as most humans have implants or other impurities in them and reject him violently - bloody explosions of unsuitable host bodies), he stumbles upon Nikopol, whose body is clean and perfect for Horus, as he has been in a cryogenic state for decades. Nikopol is the only human male who doesn't have an artificial organ or other implant.
Well, to cut a long story short, Horus does procreate and at the end of the film, is reborn. The clock runs out on him and he is collected by Anubis and Bast for final burial.
The baby son of Jill can transform into a blue falcon at will when he wants to satisfy his predatory instincts.
As for them playing monopoly, I don't know if a scene was cut out but they are bored while waiting for Horus to finish his "mission" and Anubis reads instructions to one of the Earth games and figures out how to play this, to pass the time with Bast.
Anyway, as a fan of Bilal, I did like the movie as I understood everything. Hope this helps when you view it a second time. You may be surprised.