All Artificial, No Intelligence: ARGYLLE

Is this just what movies are going to be now? I sank in my seat as I asked myself that question while the deadening Argylle played out on screen. I dreaded the answer as my pessimism grew. The image was bright. The sound was loud. And I was entirely bored. The thing is just so phony I could hardly believe it as it grew worse by the second. The picture opens with an exaggerated goof on spy movie tropes as Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) chases a bombshell villainess (Dua Lipa) down twisty Grecian streets while his partners in espionage (John Cena and Ariana DeBose) press buttons and sip coffee. Dua Lipa is on a motorcycle doing tight turns and Cavill is sailing over rooftops in a jeep. There’s not a single shot that doesn’t look sloppily green-screened or like the actor’s face hasn’t been plastered on a stunt person or the digital recreation thereof. The dialogue is all tinny and the scenario entirely prefab. At least when it cuts to Bryce Dallas Howard playing the author of junky spy novels, revealing this prologue was a scene from her latest book, one can briefly entertain the notion that the exaggerated falseness was the point. But then scenes of Howard’s quote-unquote normal life proceed with the same blatantly chintzy computerized backdrops and, as the movie progresses, not a single location appears real in any meaningful sense. Every sequence—dialogue and action alike—is shot with the same bland sloppiness as the opening. It gets less forgivable every time it shows a glitchy face-replacement or cartoon cat effect. When you can’t even get a real cat on set, or at least make a convincing digital double, something’s gone awry.

The movie ramps up into more silliness—dragging through 140-some minutes of plot structured as nesting dolls of stupid twists—as the author is entangled in real espionage as warring spies want her to write the next chapter of a real case. The supporting cast—Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Catherine O’Hara, Bryan Cranston—gamely props up the silliness by snarling and chewing on every scrap of interest the dialogue manages to provide. (Not much; this is a movie that’s constantly, loudly grinning and nodding at its own misplaced sense of cleverness.) But with all this talent and potential, the movie is totally dead on arrival for its aesthetic sins. It’s a part of a mind-numbing trend of visual despair that finds the complete erasure of real things in head-scratching preference for the ugly fakery of pure digital mush. Real and talented performers are stranded with not only a nonsense plot pushed along by scenes of mindless exposition, but in entire worlds of falsehood. I’m sure it doesn’t help that every shot, every line, every concept, every twist is so totally overplayed and thoroughly cliched. It’s cluttered with noisy snark and pounding pseudo-ironic needle-drops and misfiring comedy and redirecting twists that all collide to undermine each other. In the end, Samuel L. Jackson spends half of the climax watching a Lakers game, and the other half watching a slow download’s progress bar, and that’s the fun part. Who cares about a floating CGI fortress blowing up in animated flames while our flimsy heroes speed off in a fake getaway boat into an unreal sunset? It’s witless fakery all the way down.

Used to be you could suspend your disbelief in a high-concept adventure movie because at least the cars and boats and landscapes and animals were real. And real things blew up in beautiful fireballs. And the effects served the story instead of feeling like a rich frosting that’s totally replaced the cake. Now we have this nadir of current trends, with a 200 million dollar movie from deep-pocketed studios, a name director, and a cast that’s cumulatively EGOTed, and it barely looks like a movie at all. It’s over lit, overwrought, computerized nothing. Not even scenes of people in a field or on a roof escape a completely disconnected physical space in front of computer-generated backdrops that make old-fashioned studio rear-projection look believable. Director Matthew Vaughn’s earlier works, like vulgar alt-superhero comedy Kick-Ass and the super-violent double-oh riffing Kingsman movies, are also hyperbolic and over-cranked works of excessive style in action and violence. But at least those have a kind of swirling CG coherence grounded in something pulpy and filmic. With Argylle it’s all frictionless digital blandness. For a big-budget spy movie, it doesn’t look expensive, or glamorous, and the action isn’t clever or exciting. It simply goes on and on, completely and totally alienated from reality and cinema alike. Of course it makes its main characters’ favorite song the new zombie Beatles track—they swirl down the same cultural gutter, amalgamated simulacrum of culture we used to enjoy. We’re in a time where cultural products can be all artificial, no intelligence.

Rise of the Guardians: ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE

How appropriate that Zack Snyder’s vision for Justice League ended up being a long, melancholy, mournful, patient, troubled and yet ultimately hesitantly triumphant movie about resurrections. There’s a Superman who died in the climax of 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and will eventually be revived with alien magic. There’s an ancient pact between man and gods due to be restored in order to combat an alien invasion. There are heroes who once had hope who will find their reasons for fighting again. Elsewhere there’s a dying teenage hacker robotically revived by his scientist father, and a speedy young man hoping to restore his father’s good name. There’s even the villain’s plot: to unearth antique terraforming machines long-buried and bring about devastating world-changing power to prepare the way for fiery apocalyptic inter-dimensional conquerors. There’s something curiously moving about all of these images and statements and motifs of death and rebirth, about parents missing children, mentors losing pupils, lovers separated by loss, defenders drained of their will — and at every step the slow work of building coalitions to protect and save. That it was all there, before he left the project due to a family tragedy, before its initial 2017 release buried those ideas under reshoots and reedits by Joss Whedon that made it into something poppier and emptier and deeply confused, makes this restored and completed cut not only a total improvement in every way, but something of a resurrection itself.  

Snyder’s vision of the DC universe, it’s clear to see, is dark and alienating in many ways. His 2013 Man of Steel takes the last son of Krypton not as uncomplicated superhero, but as the alien being he is. (Henry Cavill’s otherworldly handsomeness helps there.) It takes him seriously, and sees that he's a little scary, as it scrambles the usual take in what, after decades of superhero movies' samey bright quips and weightless consequences-free spectacle, stands out as unusually weighty, destructive, calamitous. It has a certain power. Similarly, Snyder’s grim versus followup snapped into clearer focus for me these days. After the year we’ve had, is there any doubt a real Superman would not exactly unite our divisions? I wrote at the time that that film is “intent to imagine a worst-case scenario superhero world, in which they’re…vigilantes viewed with suspicion, fear, and worship, and who nonetheless must muster the energy to save the planet.” I called the movie cynical and heavy and curdled, and I don’t think I’d change my mind about those adjectives, but I would change my mind about that being a bad thing. Maybe it’s just the passage of time, or the tenor of the times, but I found myself, in revisiting the Snyder-verse over the last few weeks, sympathetic to and engaged by his attempt to try something different. After all, we have so many superhero stories that go the same route over and over and over again — hitting the same beats, making the same poses, telling the same moral lessons while ignoring areas of culpability these larger-than-life figures would have in something like the real world. Why not try to spin a new myth out of old symbols? Snyder is a powerful image-maker for good and for ill, but in this new cut of Justice League he puts some of his finest filmmaking to use clarifying and extending his vision for this comic book universe.

His Justice League assembles in a film full of typical Snyder touches: obvious symbolism, thick layers of atmosphere, slow-mo poses and vivid pop art combat, moody music and acrobatic violence, terse exposition and pulp poetry, flashy comic book fashions and rippling physiques. But its very idiosyncrasy is what makes it so compelling, and its excess so watchable. He’s using the language of blockbusters to muscle in his mythmaking, to pour out his heart into these squares of hectic collisions and languidly drawn emotions. It’s outsized — every frame squared off by cinematographer Fabian Wagner in tall boxy IMAX aspect ratio — and sometimes corny — like a robot-man envisioning the economy as an enormous bear and bull fighting — but it’s always clearly springing out of a singular, complicated vision with its inconsistency and eccentricity earnestly displayed. Here’s a boy trying to save a girl in a slow-mo sequence agonizingly stretched until it’s almost romantic. Here’s an army of Amazons fighting against a marauding alien, their queen's voice quaking as she tries to warn her exiled daughter. Here’s a grieving reporter in a soft heart to heart with her dead fiancé’s mother. Here’s a father and a son grappling with catastrophic change, a source of connection that nonetheless drives them further apart. Here’s the heir to Atlantis brushing off his birthright. Here’s the solo vigilante forced to admit he needs some help. It all builds to calamitous action, and that’s satisfying enough as those things go — and probably the best Snyder’s ever done it — but it’s the long build up — nearly three whole hours of it — devoted to characters and their tentative connections forging and accruing that’s most interesting.

That’s not to say it all works. The thing stretches to just past four hours and hits some of the same thinness that structured the first theatrical cut. The gloopy animated villain and his world-ending plot is never quite as sharp as the best of its genre competitors', and some side characters get lost in the shuffle. (I found the fleeting appearance of an unbilled surprise pretty much a whiff, and a newly shot nightmare at the end of the epilogue a bummer of a conclusion that probably should’ve gone post-credits as it spoils the mood of the main story’s resolution.) And it’s still in some way playing grab-bag with the standard tropes. But the superhero genre provides us so little majesty these days, it’s satisfying to watch Snyder get there. It put me in mind of Ang Lee’s Hulk and Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboys and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Mans, movies of this kind that have big CG spectacle and swinging action and popcorn plotting that somehow manage to be personal and eclectic visions, about real human emotions buried under the spandex and shining through the actors’ intimate moments between slam-bang high-speed collisions. He poses his performers iconographically, and they all fit the parts well. Jason Momoa is an ideal charismatic reluctant Aquaman; Gal Gadot is still a fine Wonder Woman; Ezra Miller is good comedic relief Flash; Ray Fisher does swell robo-soul searching as Cyborg; and Ben Affleck’s Batman has never been better. Snyder has them bring out flickers of humanity in the grinding exposition and explosions. The whole long picture is evocative, exciting, exhausting, and always distinctive. Even when it’s silly, or soggy, at least it’s sincere. It’s exactly what it wants to be — a thunderous cracked fantasy of a fallen modern world that maybe, just maybe, can be temporarily solved by restoring something we love.

Whoever Wins, We Lose: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

Having seen 2013’s Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot which was a serviceable origin story retelling until it exploded in monotonous tone-deaf city-smashing, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as punishing as its title is unwieldy. It’s another of Snyder’s dunderheaded epics of missing the point, a gleaming picture of dour comic book tableaus pre-digested with little regard for meaning, stripped of whatever power they once had, and weighed down by the burden of a visually overdetermined and thematically indigestible form. Overstuffed with empty calories, every so often the lumpy mass chokes up ideas so thoughtless and virulently stupid I couldn’t help but wonder if it was subliminally disgorged from the ugliest corners of our national id. After all, this is a movie about a noble extraterrestrial savior and a tortured crimefighter and the best it can think to do is contrive reasons for them to scowl as they go about representing the mindset of anyone whose first response to reasonable disagreement is to punch it in the face.

The story finds Superman (Henry Cavill) a divisive figure. He smashed up Metropolis pretty good in the last movie, ostensibly in the process of saving it, but with the unintended consequence of inflicting a 9/11-scale disaster on every other block. That understandably made a few people mad. Some, like a Senator (Holly Hunter, underutilized) whose logical concern is treated as mildly treacherous, want to constrain his power. Others, like Batman (Ben Affleck, growling with brooding trauma), whose alter-ego’s Wayne Enterprises had a skyscraper caught in the fracas, plot to bring him punishment for his otherworldly strength and its potential bad consequences. Still others, like villain Lex Luthor (played as a squirrely sociopathic tech bro by Jesse Eisenberg), want to contrive a reason to something something Kryptonite. It’s all of a piece with an intent to image a worst-case scenario superhero world, in which they’re lawless self-righteous power-mad vigilantes viewed with suspicion, fear, and worship, and who nonetheless must muster the energy to save the planet.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea. A real Superman would indeed be a scary thing, a man who could not be controlled by any earthly authority if he so chose. We’re lucky he mostly wants to do the right thing. But in Snyder’s vision, this becomes a troublingly muddled mess. It presents a Superman weirdly uncharacterized, and mostly motivated by his desire to save his mother, Ma Kent (Diane Lane), and his girlfriend, Lois Lane (Amy Adams). He’s not much of an altruist, aside from a few token saves, and certainly lives up to the suspicion he’s under. He acts with impunity, and on a whim. As for Batman, here he’s a violent bruiser, killing waves of faceless criminals by gun, by car, by plane, and by hand in bone-crunching rounds of savagery, then branding his logo onto the survivors. Ouch. This is bleak, grim nihilism, a film in which superpowers are real, but the idea of heroes is foreign. At one point Daily Planet editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) snaps: “The American conscience died...”

Snyder, with a script by Chris Terrio (Argo) and David S. Goyer (Blade Trinity), is channeling the trend begun in 80’s and 90’s comics that mistook a dim, darkly lit, and violent vision for an interesting, realistic, and meaningful one. Here’s a movie convinced its unremitting cruelty and cheap cynicism adds up to ideas of any import. It’s just deadening and uncomfortable, with pessimism and nastiness so garbled it comes out sounding downright fascist. It makes its heroes monsters to be feared, and then forces us to look up to them anyway. Its world is better off without them – every outlandish conflict is a direct result of their actions – but we’re to root for their demagogic unilateralism, to let them run rampant because only they have the super-strength to strong-arm their way to a victory. And if a certain number of mere mortals have to be obliterated in the name of their idea of justice, so be it.

The film traffics in images of terror. One scene finds a suicide bomber detonating in slow motion, the flames billowing out. The movie is bookended by buildings collapsing and filling the streets of a major east coast city with smoke and debris while citizens flee. An early inciting incident is a chaotic ambush in an African outpost used for political power plays in Congress. Snyder injects these unmistakable real-world associations into the film to goose its power, and to lend borrowed gravity to the story of two superheroes deciding to fight each other to prove…something. It’s borderline irresponsible, especially as he uses these spectacles of terror to excuse their actions, to argue for the justification of these men serving as their own judges, juries, and executioners. And every character who expresses reasonable objections is met with death, usually at the hands of this threat, as if to say they got what was coming to them for daring to want limits on these God-like super-people.

So it’s not much fun for most of the 151-minute runtime. It’s a slog, not just for its heavy (and heavy-handed) mood, but also for its straining and monotonous graveness. It grinds good performers under its demands, sapping Cavill and Affleck of charisma, turning Adams and Lane into damsels in distress, and leaving everyone else, including Jeremy Irons as faithful butler Alfred, trying to coax life into turgid exposition. When not going through its over-extended plodding plot, it’s mostly a cavalcade of seeds for future sequels and spin-offs, bringing in Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) for a mostly blank glorified cameo, the worst of which finds her in front of a computer essentially watching three teasers for upcoming projects. Or maybe it’s the upskirt flash that’s the nadir of the movie’s insistence on turning every woman into a pawn to be trapped – one maternal figure is gagged and bound in sadistic Polaroid’s – or, failing that, sexualized. It’s dismaying, just another reason I found the whole desensitized thing exhausting and tiresome, from its opening repeat of the Wayne deaths to an ersatz King Kong restaging followed by a hero getting nuked in the face.

This is a technically proficient blockbuster insisting on loudly thundering down the wrong road at every turn, ponderously bringing flights of fancy to overblown heights and down to reductive muck. With the whole history of these iconic larger-than-life characters to play with, there’s nothing more imaginative here than having one of them trying to hit the other over the head with, say, a porcelain sink. Still, it’s best when mind-numbing, in long sequences of concussive fantasy fight night or bonkers nightmare sequences, for at least that’s a break from its maddening point of view. Built from mythic and resonant components made curdled and rotten, its characters are meant to save us, but are indifferent to the suffering in their wake. Neither red-blooded adventure nor sharp auto-critique, it’s content to be ugly and cacophonous, the sights and sounds of this approach to the genre wrung-out and dying before our eyes.

Spy Game: THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a sparkling big-screen adaptation of the 1960s’ spy show, is a super dry espionage spectacle. Its director is at his best when he’s playing with wide-frame action (shown off wonderfully in his Robert Downey Jr-starring Sherlock Holmes adaptations), intricately convoluted plotting (in Holmes and his scrappy British gangster pictures), and long winding scenes of circular dialogue that simply enjoys the pleasures of hearing pretty people speak barbed banter. It all comes together to make an U.N.C.L.E. oozing charisma out of each impeccably designed, handsomely photographed shot. It’s slight and knows it, content simply to groove on a 60’s spy vibe, like Le Carré lite, or Diet Fleming. Other than some computer-assisted camera swopping and gliding, it’d be pretty much the same thing if it were the long-lost hippest spy movie of 1963. (Well, second best. It’s no From Russia With Love.)

Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram have cooked up a capering jaunt through Cold War tensions, used for little more than their vintage analog throwback appeal. They find a swaggering American spy, an ex-thief turned master of misdirection named Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill), clashing with a Russian spy, a powerful Soviet bruiser named Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). The two antagonistic national forces are forced to work together when British intelligence (personified by Jared Harris, then Hugh Grant) uncovers word that a horrible nuclear MacGuffin is in the hands of a dastardly aristocratic European couple (Elizabeth Debicki and Luca Calvani). The device will give whoever controls it power over the entire globe. That’s bad enough to get the Americans and Russians on the same page.

The following espionage and heist tomfoolery allows plenty of room for Cavill and Hammer to create a prickly competition. They never work together, exactly. It’s more like parallel missions reluctantly leaning on the other when things get diciest. Between them is a beautiful German woman (Alicia Vikander), a pawn smuggled out from behind the Berlin Wall in order to get the agents closer to her ex-Nazi uncle (Sylvester Groth), a key to finding the whatchamacallit and saving the world. She’s more charming than both men put together, and more than eager to stand up for herself and provide advice as to how the mission could be better executed. What starts as a standard damsel role wrests control over the proceedings before falling back into victimhood for the slam-bang action-based ending. Ritchie finds satisfyingly peculiar ways to show off the film’s adventure, often in the background, like my favorite moment, a boat chase that happens almost entirely off screen while a character takes a breather, dryly regarding the chaos from the vantage point of his impromptu picnic.

Bursting with star charisma, the lead trio of capable undercover agents flirtatiously needles each other about malfunctioning gadgets, critiques wardrobe choices, and withholds key information from one another. In true spy movie fashion, they all have their secret motives. But with so much buried intent in the characters’ behaviors, the film’s pleasures are nonetheless all surface. Joanna Johnston’s costumes are perfectly tailored. Daniel Pemberton's score is swinging sixties' frothiness. John Mathieson’s cinematography has an unnatural CGI flow, but a vintage crispness to its symmetries, eventually bursting forth with zippy split-screens instead of crosscutting when the action reaches its zenith. It’s all about showcasing handsome people in beautiful clothing, luxuriating in trading innuendoes and teasing insults, and enacting clockwork double-crosses with zigzagging spycraft. It’s fizzy and fine, an undemanding aesthetic delight.

Almost Super: MAN OF STEEL

There are superheroes I enjoy more as characters, but none I enjoy more as resonant myth than Superman. He is an icon, a titan, a God. He’s Greek myth, Messianic, a Shakespearean conflicted hero, a piece of Americana and refutation of it. He’s not merely a superhero; he’s the superhero. And so, like the rarified company in which this character can be placed, his story is one worth retelling and one that can survive a bad telling. In Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman and its first sequel, a light touch to the myth was sunny and inspiring in its classically endearing earnestness that flirts with corniness without giving over to it. By the time the blue-suited, red-caped hero flew back to the silver screen care of Bryan Singer in the retro-modern stylings of 2006’s Superman Returns, he was suffused with regret and longing in a film that’s both mature and lyrical. Now, with Man of Steel, he’s back, this time in the hands of Zack Snyder, director of 300 and Watchmen. He’s a generally talented visualist who ramps up the surface spectacle and brings admirable weight to the myth before sinking into the same lumbering traps that so many modern blockbusters settle for.

It starts, as it must, with the birth of Kal-El, last son of Krypton, born in the final days of his planet’s existence. His father (Russell Crowe) and mother (Ayelet Zurer) send him away in an escape pod that crashes on Earth. There, the yellow sun and rich atmosphere give the alien, who to all appearances looks human, powers of strength, flight, and speed, among other superhuman feats. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. From a distance you just might mistake him for a bird or a plane. Nope. He’s Superman. But not right away. The script by David S. Goyer, from a story he co-created with Dark Knight auteur Christopher Nolan, cuts between a lost young man searching for evidence of his identity and a little boy scared of what these strange abilities mean for his life with his adoptive parents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). In the fractured chronology, we catch glimpses of important moments – discovering his powers, saving people, wrestling with his sense of purpose – building towards the crescendo that is the unveiling of the man we’ve been waiting to see.

I find the Superman origin so deeply moving and archetypically resonant that the glimmering, artful opening passages of Man of Steel are an often stirring experience. Snyder and his team emphasize the alien in the story, focusing on what isolates Clark Kent in the days before his Superman identity. As a young boy his powers are strange. He’s not sure to what use, if any, he should put them. They scare him.  As the origin story starts to fade, villains, in the form of exiled evil Kryptonians led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) arrive on Earth demanding to meet Kal-El or else. Between an identity crisis on a galactic scale and otherworldly villains, this is less a superhero movie as we’ve come to understand them, more an alien invasion space opera, dark, complicated, and endlessly explaining itself. Krypton’s a fantasy world (like something out of Star Wars or John Carter) brought into conflict with our world and Superman must choose which to save. It should be a real struggle, but the film makes it awfully clear for the man which way to go. He doesn’t have to decide to be a hero; the decision is forced upon him, no matter how heavily Snyder underlines the Gethsemane moment.

The film is expertly cast and beautifully shot – though the action is sometimes barely contained by the frame – full of the story beats one would want out of a Superman movie. It purports to tell the story of Superman, but eventually it becomes clear that it has skipped out on deeper characterization. As Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman Henry Cavill fits the suit and fills the angst, but he’s otherwise a symbol. It’s a demanding, unforgiving task and he handles it well. In the supporting cast, great actors show up in roles we recognize and the film’s attempt to flesh them out mostly stops there. Amy Adams plays Lois Lane. Cultural osmosis tells us she’s a smart, capable, Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter at the Daily Planet and the movie follows suit. As expected, she takes an interest in this Superman story. Her tough-but-kind editor is Perry White, played by Laurence Fishburne, so wonderful you wish he had something more substantial to contribute to the plot. There’s endless fatherly gravitas from both Crowe and Costner (his casting alone causes the farm scenes to play off of Field of Dreams echoes) and Lane is a beacon of maternal warmth. Shannon, all crazy-eyed, gargling intensity with each barked shout, makes for a good hateful villain.

And then it all goes to pieces with an extended action set piece that grows more weightless and small the bigger, more destructive and depressingly weighty it becomes. Snyder spends much time lingering on skyscrapers tumbling in cringe-worthy bouts of collateral damage. Evenly matched superpowered beings slug it out around and, more often, through buildings of all shapes and sizes for extended periods of time, zipping away while debris falls and massive structures collapse. There’s such an overpowering sense of seriousness that we can’t even luxuriate in the serious silliness of it all, the spandex, scene-chewing mythos that should be able to carry us through. Instead we have to pretend yet another sequence of violence erupting around a world-ending alien laser beam shooting into the sky in the center of a cityscape is something we haven’t seen twice a summer for half a decade.

The film is both too much and not enough. I loved seeing Superman on the big screen again, but found myself wishing it could have been in a film that did more than satisfy the basic demands of a summer blockbuster: percussive score, excessive property damage, recognizable symbols, muddled ideology, self-seriousness. Sitting through the protracted climax, it all felt so endless. But by the time the credits rolled I found myself thinking, “That’s it?” After over two-and-a-half hours, I realized I knew the characters, but I barely knew these characters. It’s a film that plays with iconography and summons all the best that Superman can offer, before leaving it thin and pushing it aside to give us a big, repetitive superpower slugfest that’s just like any other grim, grey blockbuster conclusion. Maybe they’re saving the really inspiring stuff for the sequel.

Almighty Tarsem: IMMORTALS

Tarsem Singh burst onto the feature filmmaking scene with the 2000 serial-killer phantasmagoria The Cell, which followed Jennifer Lopez on an investigation into the mind of a serial killer. It is a wild and striking film, if a whiff derivative on a plot level. Eight years later, his self-financed masterpiece The Fall, a dizzying film with a mannered yet improvisatory and sumptuous fantasy told by an injured stunt man to a young girl who is in the same hospital. It’s a singular work of imagination, overwhelmingly heartfelt and impressive to behold. These two films marked Tarsem as a filmmaker to watch.

His latest, Immortals, is a bombastic film that uses Greek myth as inspiration, thundering forth with the brute force of legend and myth. It doesn’t feature characters; it features types. It doesn’t feature mere swordplay and togas; it creates deliriously gorgeous tableaus of crushingly beautiful visions that manage to skirt the edge of camp and arrive at somewhere closer to a particularly busy and gory perfume commercial. It’s a film that is consistently visually alive, yet can’t escape the inert forces of its genre that threaten to drag it into monotony.

The plot involves evil King Hyperion (an impenetrably mumbling Mickey Rourke) who wishes to find a legendary bow that was long ago lost during the conflict in the heavens that resulted in the Gods locking the Titans away in a gold cage in the dark rocky depths of Mount Tartarus. Hyperion’s army rages across the land, slaughtering and pillaging its way towards his ultimate goal of freeing the Titans and unleashing chaos on the land he could then easily conquer with this magical weapon. He kidnaps a group of oracles, among them the one true psychic (Freida Pinto) who will be able to find the bow, and continues towards the small cliff-side village where Theseus (Henry Cavill) lives.

This village is evacuating, but the peasants are left behind. Theseus objects but is left behind anyways. So, he is there when Hyperion shows up to kill as many as he can. Theseus fights back but is unable to prevent his mother’s death. Distraught, Theseus is captured and ends up in the same group of prisoners as the oracles. Under the cover of darkness, a thief (Stephen Dorff) helps Theseus and the psychic escape and head off to find the bow before Hyperion can, in hopes of using it against him and saving the world.

Tarsem employs a mix of CGI and practical sets to create a kind of magical middle ground between the glistening flesh and blood, the rippling muscles and smooth skin of the human actors and the arresting, colorful landscapes. At key moments, movements slow, sometimes accompanied with a warping or fading of the sound, so that we can more appreciate the gravity of the situations or the fluidity of the movements. Sumptuous in color, but dull in mood, these humans have little to say, but much gravity in their voices with which to say it.

Above it all, lounging in their marble castle in the clouds, are the Gods. They’ve told themselves that they wouldn’t interfere with the humans for some reason or other. Though a smirking old man (John Hurt), Theseus’s mentor, is revealed to be a divine proxy, and therefore seems to ignore the Gods’ own laws. But anyways, Zeus (Luke Evans), Aries (Daniel Sharman), Athena (Isabel Lucas), and Poseidon (Kellan Lutz), who are smoother and cleaner than their human subjects, brood about and occasionally zip down on shiny gold beams of light to offer help to our heroes.

This all sounds like a lot of fun, and it often is, especially in Tarsem’s most brilliant moments of mind-bogglingly beautiful spectacle or mind-bogglingly brutal gore. It’s a film that plays best when we’re only required to sit there in awe of the strength of the images, through its intensity of action and its warm, ornate, computer-embellished sets. Though the look of the film is tremendous across the board, my favorite aspect has to be the way the characters look.

The costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka are luscious and memorable. Tight togas and elaborate headgear fit nicely on the Gods while the good mortal men are all leather and armor and the good mortal women all flowing robes with low necklines, when not in red bedazzled burqas. The villains wear ferocious animalistic masks and helmets. My favorite of all the costumes is a close call between the tall, shining spikes on Aries’s hat and the dark Venus fly trap helmet that appears to be this close to chomping down on Rourke’s face as he glowers menacingly towards anyone who gets in his line of vision.

Where the film falls flat is when it feels the need to get some storytelling out of the way in order to move us from spectacular image to spectacular image. (Still, it’s far better than other recent loosely Greek-myth-based nonsense like the Clash of the Titans remake and 300, since at least it has some honest spectacle to give us.) The script by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides is awfully belabored at its start, slack and shapeless as it sets up conflict and introduces characters. Theseus has to suffer through an introductory why-don’t-you-find-a-nice-girl? scene of maternal worry that I feel I’ve seen in too many movies of this type. By the time the villain is made appropriately hiss-worthy and the heroes have assembled, the pace picks up and the clunky talky bits don’t clog up the way with quite the same frequency, though it still has trouble sustaining tension in any of the subplots.

This is a movie about poses and shouts, glamour and gore. It’s about the bludgeoning power of myth. There’s no time for subtlety or emotional engagement. If it had pushed itself into further abstraction, relying solely on the power of its striking imagery, it could have really been great. This is a terrific, expressionistic silent film nearly ruined by the need to succumb to contemporary narrative convention, setting up storytelling expectations it has no desire whatsoever to fulfill. It should be a primal story of epic stakes, but it underwhelms, especially when compared to the style. It still may be worth seeing, but without Tarsem’s visual sense, this movie wouldn’t be worth considering.