Immortals

Long ago, two bands of Immortals did battle and discovered that they could be killed by one another. The victors of this battle, led by Zeus, declared themselves gods. The losers, named titans, were imprisoned in Mount Tartarus. Now that they are gods, Zeus declared that they would take no direct role in the world of humans on penalty of death. Many years later, the gods are viewed as little more than superstition by a large portion of the population. Angry that the gods did not spare his family from death, King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) wants to abolish the gods by unleashing the titans. His army is marching across Greece.

Theseus (Henry Cavill) is a capable youth in a cliff side village though he is of low status because his mother, Aethra, was raped to beget him. His mother is a devout worshipper of the gods though Theseus is a non-believer. He has been taught to fight by a kindly old man (John Hurt). It turns out that the old man is really Zeus (Luke Evans) in disguise.

The village is attacked and Theseus leaps into action to save his mother's life. He kills a number of King Hyperion's men before he is brought down in a net. Hyperion steps forward and slits Aethra's throat and sentences Theseus to slavery. He is taken to the temple where the Phaedra (Frieda Pinto) the Oracle is held. As chance would have it, Phaedra beholds a vision when she briefly brushes against the near catatonic Thesues. She plans an escape, enlisting the aid of Stavros the Thief (Stephen Dorff).

Hyperion's interest in the Oracle was to locate the Epirus Bow, a powerful weapon lost during the battle between god and titan. He needs it to unleash the titans. Her escape proves a nuisance. He dispatches the Beast, a huge man who wears a bull's head made out of barbed wire. While in the labyrinthine temple near his village, Theseus is attacked by the Beast mere moments after discovering the Epirus Bow. It comes as no surprise that he kills the Minotaur.

Armed with this weapon of power, Theseus stumbles into an obvious trap and loses it. Before Hyperion's men can kill him, Ares in a ludicrous spiky headdress (it doesn't qualify as a helmet) comes down from Mount Olympus and slaughters them with his war hammer. No sooner has he saved the day than Zeus appears and kills him. Yes, Zeus kills Ares. Don't recall that from Greek mythology.

Zeus tells Theseus that he has faith in humanity to avert the evil of Hyperion. So it is that Theseus travels to Mount Tartarus to lead the defenders in protecting the prison of the Titans. The effort fails. Hyperion succeeds in blasting open the Titans' prison with the bow and the gods come down from Mount Olympus to face them. Led by Zeus, there is Athena, Heracles, Poseidon, and Apollo. The Titans - all unnamed - have speckled gray skin and snarls. The hard to follow battle shows the gods wreaking havoc at super-speed. You know the type: you knock a guy off his feet and while he is falling, you kill a couple guys, then come back to hammer the falling guy into the ground. And yet there are always more Titans to kill. It's like their prison was a clown car spilling more and more clowns to do battle. In the end, only Zeus is standing and the remaining titans are closing in. Samson-like, he pulls Mount Tartarus down upon them.

Meanwhile, Theseus is in an epic battle with Hyperion. One wonders what the point is. He's already unleashed the titans. So the two pummel one another for what seems an eternity. Finally, Theseus wins but apparently dies in the process. However, he is transported to Olympus, presumably to take his place among them.
The movie concludes with Phaedra living in Theseus' village by the sea, raising their son, Acamas. While looking upon the statue erected in his father's honor, Acamas meets the Old Man (Zeus in disguise). Ah, the circle continues.

The movie has a very peculiar look. The director (Tarsem Singh) wanted to make an action film with the look of Renaissance painting. All too often, the movie is dark. It is amazing how often stuff was done at night or in dimly-lit rooms. Some of the outfits are goofy, notably the headgear of the gods or the silly helmet of Hyperion.

The Epirus Bow is straight out of the Dungeons &Dragons cartoon. You pull on the string and a magical glowing arrow appears. The arrow is amazingly powerful, able to blast a 6 foot diameter hole in a fortified gate. It is based on nothing, as there is no basis for it in Greek Myth. Sure, there are famous archers - Heracles, Apollo, Artemis - but no magical bows. The closest I recall would be the bow of Heracles that was, after his death, used to slay Paris of Troy during the Trojan War.

This is an artistic rewrite of the tale of Theseus. Theseus, son of Poseidon by Aethra, is most noteworthy for having slain the Minotaur in the labyrinth of King Minos. He had escaped from the Labyrinth thanks to the intervention of Minos' daughter, Ariadne. She had fallen in love with him but he spurned her once the Minotaur was dead. While adventuring in the Amazon lands, Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, fell in love with him. They had a child, a son named Hippolytus. Phaedra was his second wife who, oddly enough, fell in love with Hippolytus! Unpopular in Athens, Theseus fled to Skyros. Lycomedes, king in Skyros, feared that Theseus would depose him so he pushed the great hero off a cliff. Though he killed a variety of villains in his mythic career, the film reflects almost none of it.

I'm not clear on why the story bothers with Greek myth since it is almost unrecognizable except for the names. The Olympians were not a `hands off' bunch of deities. During the Trojan War – Theseus' son, Acamas, is one of the soldiers in the Trojan Horse, while the Gods are on the battlefield and sending down aid from the heavens. They are intimately involved. Odysseus was lost at sea for 10 years because Poseidon was angry with him. Hera constantly tried to kill Heracles (Hercules), starting with a pair of snakes in his crib! They are only too happy to mettle in the affairs of men.

It has its moments but is generally a weak film.

Outlander

Here is a disappointing take on the Beowulf story that I saw in June 2009:

The movie opens with a spacecraft's fiery descent into Earth's atmosphere and eventually plunging into a lake in Norway. Two figures rise from the lake's bottom, wearing what might best be described as powered armor. In the morning, only one is alive. Kainen (James Caviezel) queries a computer/signal buoy where he is. The computer tells him he is on a primitive planet with an abandoned colony. The year is 709 AD.

After setting his distress beacon and learning the local language via computer implant, he sets out with his blaster to hunt the Moorwen that escaped from his ruined ship. He soon discovers the smoldering remains of a village though there are no bodies. The Moorwen has been here. He immediately sets to pursue but is overcome by a mounted Viking. His blaster tumbles down a hillside and washes away in a stream. Bound, he is dragged back to the fortress of King Rothgar (John Hurt).

This rather disappointing introduction of our hero does not much improve through the movie. The Moorwen proves to be truly devastating, virtually invulnerable to the weapons of the era, ridiculously fast, and somewhat larger than a draft horse. Very quickly, I was wondering how Kainen expected to face this thing without his gun. I was also wondering why he left his powered armor behind. Continually, Kainen seeks to face the Moorwen with nothing more than a crude sword but, as luck would have it, the Moorwen leaves him be.

Kainen's and the Moorwen's back story is told in occasional flashbacks and eventually he tells the King's daughter (Sophia Myles) his sad history. His people had found a planet suitable for colonization but the Moorwen were dangerous. Viewed as nothing more than animals, his people had committed genocide to prepare the world for colonists. As a warrior, he was granted land on the new planet and settled his wife and son there. But not all the Moorwen were dead and Kainen was off-world when it came for revenge.

All efforts to kill the Moorwen fail as more and more folk are slaughtered. There are now two Moorwen, the younger having infiltrated the Viking fort via the well. Finally, after the sword he was given breaks on the Moorwen's hide, he decides it's time for a return to his ship. So, does he recover his powered armor? Does he raid the weapons' locker for a spare blaster? No, he recovers parts of the hull so that the blacksmith can forge some stronger swords. Right. We are never told what that alloy is but one wonders if the blacksmith's forge is even capable of getting hot enough to affect it. So, armed with these better weapons, Kainen and the handful of remaining warriors set out in search of the Moorwen's den.

As the younger Moorwen had come up from the well, Kainen decides the well will lead to the den. Sure enough, after a brief swim, he finds a tunnel. Once the others join him, they stumble about in this entirely unbelievable subterranean lair. At one point they are traversing a precarious bridge over a river of lava and the next they are on a towering cliff over the fjord with a huge waterfall. It goes without saying that Kainen succeeds in killing the Moorwen and its offspring. Kainen opts to live out his days on Earth with the King's daughter, becoming the new king in the process.

Since it is Vikings, it must be a variant of Beowulf. Yes, this is Beowulf where Moorwen stands in for Grendel/Grendel's mother/the Dragon. The Moorwen is finally slain when its arm is lopped off, just like Grendel. The Moorwen assaults the shield hall of Rothgar again and again, just as Grendel had assaulted the mead hall of Hrothgar. I suppose you could even say that the Moorwen avoided killing Kainen in much the same way that Grendel avoided killing Hrothgar. Beowulf slew Grendel and his mother and later became king; Kainen slays the Moorwen and becomes king. The names have been changed (in most cases) to protect the innocent.

Since every bit of technology is abandoned in the film's opening, the sole point of the crash is to introduce a non-historical monster to the time period. Surely, that could have been done better. Also, it would have been nice if Kainen had something, maybe just a flashlight or a lighter. Nope, he went for total immersion in the setting.