mare_cccp

Everything you WANT to see in this movie, is in the trailer. What is left in those 108mins is pure boredom... unless you're into random scenes of pointless torture... and the lead actor showing perfect six packs in few minutes of well choreographed fight scenes against skilled stunt men.

The overall look and the mood in Immortals is like in a cheap "modern ancient" TV series. By the end of the movie, you will actually know LESS about Greek mythology/history. The action scenes including Gods turn into a disgusting gore spectacle, and that's when CGI shines. If you want to see how a head explodes when you hit it with a powerful hammer, or how a chain rips through mans stomach - fast forward to the fight scene with golden people in it. These scenes are all filled with super slow-motion cuts, so you will not miss a single drop of blood. Gods themselves look gay. And I don't mean like it's a bad or good for the story (certainly it's not up for a mortal to judge God's sexual orientation)... but Luke Evans playing Zeus? No disrespect, we're talking about the supreme God almighty. I just can't see him as such. I'm amazed producers managed to make a pie out of such a huge pile of... mud. And to make money out of this? Truly amazing.

I watched the film after I read that it "... takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in ... Yugoslavia." The documentary failed at doing so. On the technical side, it is a fine documentary, the wicked, dark sense of humor makes it watchable, and if you're looking for a superficial, anti-western story about Yugoslavia, I guess you can enjoy watching it. The film is probably doing great in Russia. The authors anti-western, and "pro-Serb" (more like pro-tycoon) view has, as a result, some serious flaws in the story... He used interviews with people not known to the wide audience, presenting them as "former adviser of the president", without saying the name of the president - Slobodan Milosevic, which makes all the difference. How relevant this "adviser" guy is, shows his criticism on the West allowing low-rate credits for Serbia, as an evil scheme to increase Serbian debt(?). When the privatization was mentioned, the author failed to stress the role Milosevic's era tycoons had, letting the audience think it were western companies who bought and destroyed all the factories in Serbia. The film looks like a bad compromise between producers, director(s), author... at the same time, the author is anti-war, anti-nationalist, yet he has a soft view on Serbian war crimes - barely mentions Srebrenica Massacre, says nothing about war crimes on Kosovo, and Chetnics are presented as pro-Yugoslav freedom fighters. Slobodan Milosevic is portrayed as almost an average politician. The film makes a dark spotlight on the pro-EU parties in Serbia, making it easy for an average viewer to come up with a belief that anti-EU parties are the solution, when in fact the other side is even worse than current parties in power, hence the majority of the people voted them. If the author could have made that step back, and separate himself from the Serbian daily politic, it would be an important documentary on former Yugoslavia, Serbia, and US/EU involvement... but as I said before, it totally failed. Too bad, cos US and EU politics on former Yugoslavia was completely wrong from the start, still is, and someone should definitely publish a good, and important story about that.