IMMORTAL

"I have returned by creations"

New York, 2095. As a huge pyramid floats over the city, aliens, mutants and aliens try to co-exist in one of the largest cities on the planet. Inside the pyramid, the Egyptian Gods have returned to judge Horus (Thomas M. Pollard) for his crimes and they decide to allow him seven days amongst the people he created before he loses his immortality. Jill Bioskop (Hardy) is also new to the planet and is discovering humans for the first time before she becomes one herself. Nikopol (Kretschmann) has been accidentally released from his prison in suspended animation. These three soon become connected and they could change the balance of the future forever.

Visionary comic book writer Enki Bilal gets the chance to show what he can do with all the advances in technology but can we understand it?

Based on his cult comic series "La Foire aux immortels" and "La Femme piège", writer Enki Bilal brings his vision of the future to the silver screen but while the imagination and creativity is first rate the storyline is very hard to follow.

The main problem with the story is that you feel that you have been thrown into the middle of something that is already happening and you never get the chance to find out how we came to this point. As the film starts we discover that the pyramid is already over New York, Jill has arrived in the city and Nikopol is in prison for a thirty-year term. Without any background on the main characters, the importance of re-emergence of the Egyptian Gods, who is John and what Nikopol was jailed for and what makes him so dangerous to the authorities.

The world that Enki Bilal has created however is a visual spectacle. A combination of live actors and computer generated characters, Bilal uses the latest advances in computer graphics to create a vision of the future that transforms New York into a combination of old and new buildings to make a metropolis. The humans, aliens and mutants that inhabit the world are also extremely imaginative, from the classic look of Horus, to the mutated, fish assassins. This is a world that you want to spend time in.

'Immortal' might have a much lower budget than most films produced by Hollywood, but Enki Bilal and his creative team push the technology to the maximum to engulf you in a world of the bizarre and wonderful. The only real let down is the story that is confusing from start to finish because of the lack of backstory for the plot and the characters. Even so this is still a very enjoyable piece of science fiction.