Immortel

Immortel closes the Singapore Fantastic Film Fest, and at first glance, it gave the impression that it'll be like Stargate, then Blade Runner done Sky Captain style, all rolled into one.

I shall only offer a simplistic view of the story, as try as I may, I just couldn't find a running theme in which this film attempts to explore in more detail. There were some promising touches on cybernetic human organ replacement, mythology and cryogenics, but somehow these were just "there" and weren't really explained to give the film a smoother narrative - you have to accept that it is, otherwise you'll never get past each scene.

It is 90 years into the future, and familiar landmarks in the New York City skyline like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building are nowhere to be seen. Rather, the city looks like Star War's Coruscant, interrupted by the sudden appearance of a huge pyramid hovering above the city.

Horus (one of the Egyptian Gods, hence the pyramid) is given 7 days to roam the Earth, and he commits murders (of sorts) when finding a human body to possess without the host rejecting him. He stumbles upon a frozen body of a deposed politician, and enslaves him by fitting him with an iron leg.

But Horus' real target turns out to be a mutant of some sorts - Jill, with her blue hair and white skin, and his mission these 7 days is actually to impregnate her, so that he'll have an offspring before he gets packed away on his eternal journey to space. To put it bluntly, it seemed like a disguised soft-porn movie (artistically shot).

If that sounds simple enough, that's because you might choose to ignore the other characters that appear in this film, like the doctor experimenting on Jill, Jill's secret lover, the detective, a host of gangly creatures, and some mystery surrounding Central Park.

But the saving grace is the CGI, which takes your breath away most of the time with its surreal landscape of the future. It's one of those pioneer films which have its actors film in front of a blue/green screen most, if not all the time.

The director of this film also wrote the comic books in which this movie is based upon, and I'd feel it might help if movie-goers have read some material to have a better understanding of the backstory prior to this movie.