Immortal (Ad Vitam)

Title: Immortal (Ad Vitam)
Rating: 2.5/5
Genre: Animation, Action
Starring: Linda Hardy, Thomas Kretschmann, Charlotte Rampling
Director: Enki Bilal

Expect this to be another quick review as quite frankly, there isn't all that much to write about. Set in a dystopian future – an animated image of 'Blade Runner' – we follow the story of the mysterious pyramid emerging above the city of New York. With Horus – the Egyptian God of the Heavens – gently floating down to the city below, he quickly finds refuge in the body of the recently revived anti-eugenics activist Nikopol, coercing him into doing his bidding. Searching desperately for the mysterious Jill – a blue haired and pale alien searching for her humanity – he has but one wish: to impregnate her with his child. If I read this synopsis beforehand I might not have bothered, as whilst there is the entertaining scenes of being hunted (especially when the red flying hammerhead shark emerges) a lot of dwells on the fact that Horus wants to rape this blue haired alien, and that he has a limited time in which to do it.

The animation looks undeniably dated (even with 'Avatar' comparisons aside) but the landscapes are still breathtaking even now, and the scenes where actors and animations are mashed together are worked in a manner so as to never become distracting; the level of surface detail may not be there but that's not to say the characters are also that shallow. In fact, on many occasions I found myself wishing they would have spent longer exploring the different relationships; the head of the eugenics and his deceptive right hand woman, or the other Gods awaiting Horus' return. But again, that is no complaint of the animated characters over the actors; the generic doctor as well as the mysterious past of our lead falls into the exact same trap. There are people desperately hunting him but we are never really told why. It all feels as though it had an intricate story behind it that's never uncovered.

What possibly aggravates me the most is being shown snippets of an interesting world filled with alien cultures, the xenophobia of the general populace – even cordoning them off somewhat in 'Level 3,' an alien-only zone – and the attitudes towards eugenics which has a highly corrupt system working with the government's blessing and leaving many in a dire state. There's the medical advances where people have 'black box' video recorders implanted into their brain, where people 'upgrade' their organs like people upgrade their computers today, and absolutely none of this is ever explored. They created a fascinating world only to piss it away on a story of a God raping a woman, and I'm not sure why.