Procrustes on the Ganges

Time for negotiations is over in Tarsem Singh's Immortals.

* 1/2  (out of five stars)  Immortals. Written Charley & Vlas Parlapanides. Directed by Tarsem Singh.   

In Greek myth, the hero Theseus met a nasty customer named Procrustes. The latter was a demonic craftsman who invited weary travelers to rest on his custom-built bed. But when his hapless guests lay down, Procrustes made them exactly fit the bed by any means necessary, including stretching their bodies or chopping off their feet. Deviously, to make sure everybody needed an “adjustment”, Procrustes kept two beds of different lengths, always offering his victims the mismatched one. Of course, Theseus turned the tables on old Procrustes, making him lie down in the bed he made. Thus we get the get the English adjective "procrustean", for the quality of forcing something to meet some arbitrary standard.

            Tarsem Singh's sandal epic Immortals is procrustean too--but not in an interesting way. In these times of severely reduced expectations at the movies, is it worth mentioning that Singh's film is a lot less imaginative than actual Theseus mythology? Singh, who made his name with eye-popping visuals of The Cell (2000) and the frantic invention of The Fall (2006), breaks no narrative molds here. Instead he has produced pretty much what we've come to expect from the genre--the kind of thing that either delights twelve year-old boys, or makes the rest of us feel aberrant if we don't share the tastes of twelve year-old boys. Both the audience and the mythology (which bears scarcely any relation to the script by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides) are forced to fit the arbitrary standard of bloated, hyper-produced Hollywood action. Procrustean indeed.  

            The story is basically the same as the one in every other recent mythological/superhero/fantasy epic: in pursuit of his ambition to destroy the world, a nihilistic villain seeks the Ultimate Weapon, opposed only by the usual feckless organs of good (let's call them "justice-pussies"), and a rag-tag band of rebels led by the usual super-warrior. Here, the blanks are filled in by Mickey Rourke (as Hyperion, the nihilistic villain), something called The Epirus Bow (the ultimate weapon), and Henry Cavill (from The Tudors, and soon to be the new Man of Steel) as the hero, Theseus. The justice pussies prattle on about appeasing the Dark Lord by negotiating, but the hero knows better, that there's no negotiating with Hitler/Bin Laden/Sauron/Hyperion/The Joker/Red Skull/et al. In this procrustean school of storytelling, every conflict must be resolved with a mailed fist to the face (and add your Herman Cain “period!” right here…)

            To be sure, Singh does dress up the proceedings with his usual multi-culti drapery--touches from his native land including Indian drip-molding incongruously set in supposedly "Hellenic" temples, priestesses bedecked in lamp-like headgear as if they've floated out of the Thar desert. The story is set in some indeterminate past when all interiors look like slick layouts for upscale spas. Singh's "Taj-Minoan" aesthetic at least has the virtue of uniqueness. But in the service of a depressingly familiar story, the visual innovations feel wasted.

            Under all the rippling abs and empty tumult, Immortals does have subtext. Most obvious is its comprehensive sadism: not only must our adversaries be vanquished here, but Singh slows down the action to show the exploding heads and dismemberments in tender, loving detail. True, he’s just following the lead of Zach Snyder, who pioneered the aesthetic of hyper-bloodshed in 300. But when Gerard Butler kicked that Persian emissary into the pit in Snyder’s movie, we got the passion, and we got the bluster, but we didn’t necessarily think King Leonidas was getting off on it. Here, Singh never misses an opportunity to eroticize the dispensing of pain, as when Hyperion verbally humiliates a turncoat before he crushes his testicles with a mallet, or when Theseus, as he lies on top of Hyperion, dirty-talks him to “look into my eyes” as he penetrates him with his blade.

            Potentially more troubling is Immortals’ recurring appeals to ditch reason and “keep the faith”. Theseus, you see, starts out as a rational, skeptical fellow, taught by bad luck to depend on himself, not the gods. That’s when Singh, pointedly unlike Wolfgang Petersen in Troy, dares bring in the actual gods. Mount Olympus looks, well, like an upscale spa--but at least the gods aren't the tottering codgers of Clash of the Titans, but as young and jacked as anything from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. The pantheon is somewhat abridged here--there only seem to be a handful of gods in residence. But that’s enough to teach Theseus the error of his agnostic ways, and to sneer at the King of the Hellenes when—in typical secular-humanist fashion—the justice-pussy argues that the gods don’t really exist, but are “just metaphors”. Pretty soon the “metaphor” called Ares is intervening on Theseus’ behalf, pulverizing his enemies’ heads with a club.

            In the myths, Hyperion is not a scungilli-sucking mafia don—as Mickey Rourke plays him here—but one of the more intellectually accomplished Titans. The Titans, moreover, aren’t a platoon of nameless, mud-daubed monkey men, but the full and equal adversaries of the Olympians. (Indeed, that’s the whole point: though the Olympians win the battle, they are not necessarily more deserving to rule.) And you’d never know from this movie that Theseus is actually the mythic founder of Athens—the city that epitomized the kind of talk-heavy democratic politics Immortals has only contempt for. Along with faith, there was room for rationality and even atheism in Theseus’ city—but not here.

            What’s tragic about Immortals is not that its makers play with the myths, changing them around and using only the bits they need. It’s that they alter the myths to such little dramatic effect, trivializing and truncating them for no more reason than that they trust nobody will care.

            Somewhere in Hades, Procrustes is smiling.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro