Immortel Review

Does Enki Bilal's Immortel feature the most misleading trailer in the history fo the planet? In terms of plot and story, no. In terms of presentation, oh yes. I'd been itching to see this for a good while, enough that I'd pre-ordered the pricey French DVD release just so that I could be at the front of the line. Luckily fellow ScreenAnarchy-er Nick got a gander at the complete film a bit before that was due for release and gave me a heads up that I may want to cancel that order and go with a less expensive option. Good advice.

Immortel is the type of film that should be a cult classic. There are some truly dazzling visuals, brilliant retro-tech design, and a very well regarded trilogy of graphic novels to draw on for source material. Alas, director Enki Bilal makes some very strange production choices that reduce what should have been a more metaphysical spin on Bladerunner down to the level of pop-culture oddity.

Okay, I've already said that the film contains some dazzling visual work and that the story line proceeds as the trailer suggests, so where's the misdirection? In the decidedly non-dazzling scenes not included in the trailer. What you don't know about the film is that the trio of human actors in the trailer are pretty well the only live people involved in the production. That is not to say that there aren't other human characters throughout because there are, and lots of them, it's just that all of the others are rendered with computer graphics, and poorly rendered at that. We're talking computer game quality here, sometimes decently good gaming quality, sometimes not. Word is that Bilal farmed the CG work to a few different companies and it wouldn't be too hard to work out who did what as the approach and quality varies wildly from scene to scene and character to character.

It's too bad, really, because this could have been a fantastic film. The sequences that work are genuinely impressive stuff and despite Bilal obviously just skimming the surface of his own graphic novels for content there's some legitimate depth of thought in this world.

So what's it about? Bilal posits a future society in which bio-engineered humans co-exist both with beings so pervasively altered that they can no longer be considered truly human and with ancient gods. Society functions as a military police state largely controlled by the Eugenics Corporation, the corporation responsible for the extensive human modification on display.

Hovering over New York City is an ancient Egyptian pyramid, home to the Egyptian gods. The god Horus is being expelled for a week of freedom prior to being put to death but Anubis for some unspecified crime and he spends his final week searching out a human being to serve as a host body for himself so that he may then find a woman capable of carrying a divine child so that he may reproduce thus, at least in some sense, continuing his existence and influence in the world.

For a host he settles on Nikopol, an anti-Eugenics activist accidently freed from a prison term in suspended animation via an industrial accident and sets out in pursuit of his breeding mother Jill - a non human apparently pulled into this world through some sort of dimensional 'Intrusion' (a concept never properly explained) who is slowly becoming more human as time passes. Also in the mix are a doctor trying to help and understand Jill, and the head of the Eugenics Corporation - desperate to track down and kill Nikopol who has become a folk hero during his time in suspended animation.

The film boasts the slightly stilted dialogue that comes from non-native-English speakers writing, directing and performing in English and has some problems with a script that tries to cram a little too much detail and a few too many sub-plots in but the story is certainly compelling enough to hold your attention and it's got me curious to track down the graphic novels that serve as the source. It's just too bad about those bad CG people ... with a slightly better presentation this would have been a film kept alive on the b-circuit for ages but as it is it will fade fairly quickly. It's worth a viewing - and is actually getting a limited release right about now - but not worth the high price of importing it on DVD. Check it out, but don't break the bank to do so.