he setting is 2095 Manhattan, a future of mutants and flying cars, in which Central Park has been taken over by a strange, extra-dimensional phenomenon known as The Intrusion, which has replaced New York's greenest place with a dangerous alien landscape.
A pyramid inhabited by the ancient Egyptian gods appears over midtown, shooting down police helicopters attempting to make contact. The hawk-headed Horus (Pollard) emerges from the structure, greets the world he claims to have created, and dives into the concrete canyons, on a mission known only to himself.
Enter Jill Bioskop (Hardy), a strange woman with pale white skin and hair that resembles molting blue feathers. Her memories go back only a week, and she knows nobody except for an equally enigmatic figure named John (Frederic Pierrot), who has been supplying her with medications of unknown effect. Scientist Elma Turner (Rampling) befriends Jill and, upon examining her, discovers that her organs are all in the wrong places.
Accidentally freed from the hovering prison where he has spent the last 30 years in suspended animation, political prisoner Nikopol (Kretschmann) finds himself possessed by Horus, who, to ensure his cooperation, replaces one of his legs with an iron prosthetic he can barely move without the god's help. Horus needs the human body to mate with Jill, who is so alien she's never heard of sex before. Nikopol resents this but soon comes to feel for Jill, who reciprocates his feelings. But that's before a creature resembling a hammerhead squid comes after them. ...
Truly eccentric fantasy
The French-Italian-British co-production Immortal is one of several films, produced around the world at approximately the same time, that dispensed with physical sets in favor of CGI imagery concocted to accompany actors who performed their scenes in front of a green screen. Sin City, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the Japanese Casshern were the others.
Immortal may be the most jarring of the bunch, in part because it has the most ga-ga storyline, but also because the CGI is not just limited to its gorgeously detailed portrayal of a futuristic Manhattan. (Those scenes, taken by themselves, are among the best in film history.) The same tech is also used on most of the characters. Hardy, Kretschmann and Rampling are the only principals recognizable as flesh-and-blood human beings. The several other characters, God and Mortal, human or otherwise, are all created by actors whose performances have been overlaid with CGI makeup designed to make them look various degrees of odd—and it's sad to report that none of these works at all well. They might have been tolerable enough, were they the norm for the film, but when constantly contrasted with the intermittent appearances of people with pores, they break the suspension of disbelief that keeps an audience emotionally invested. Combine this with a truly elliptical story structure, which refuses to establish key points until well after the midway point, and therefore doesn't congeal as a narrative until well into the movie's running time, and you emerge with a film that's easy to admire as a spectacle but hard to care about as a story.
Some will be further alienated by Horus using Nikopol's body to mate with Jill in a coupling that all three characters regard as, and frankly call, rape ... as well as the fact that Jill isn't particularly traumatized by this. Her subsequent infatuation with Nikopol is supposed to be the film's great love story, but under the circumstances it emerges as downright icky. And it hurts that Nikopol is by necessity such a passive character, who cannot exercise his strong will except by cursing Horus out from time to time.
Still, the film is not entirely devoid of magic, with the absolute best moment being one that involves Jill, Nikopol and a bathtub filled with water that her body has dyed dark blue.
