New trailer for Tarsem Singh's Immortals

17 August 2011

Gerard Wood

The second trailer for Relativity Media's fantasy epic Immortals is now available, and although it doesn't quite have the impact of the first trailer (which we thought was fairly awesome), it certainly hasn’t diminished our enthusiasm for this movie. Strictly speaking this is the third "trailer" if you count the original teaser: and at 2 minutes 19 seconds (some 30 seconds longer than the first full trailer), why the hell wouldn’t you!

With narration from John Hurt a little more of the back-story is revealed in the latest trailer, but thankfully only enough to keep our interest without giving too much away. The backdrop of the story is ancient history, the War of the Gods in which Zeus and his upstart Olympian gods defeated the Elder Gods, banishing them to Tartarus. 

The story is loosely based on the legend of Theseus (Henry Cavill), demi-god son of Poseidon, and founder of Athens. The King of Crete, Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), has declared war on humanity and leads his ruthless Heraklion army on a bloody rampage across Greece. Hyperion’s army destroys everything in its path and appears to be unstoppable. The gods themselves are forbidden to intervene directly according to ancient law, but instead they furnish mankind with a hero in the form of Theseus, a village stonemason intent on revenge when his village is raided by Hyperion’s men and his mother is killed. When Theseus meets the Sybelline Oracle, Phaedra (Freida Pinto), her disturbing visions of his future convince her that he is the key to stopping the destruction. With her help, Theseus assembles a small band of followers and embraces his destiny in a final desperate battle for the future of humanity.

Hyperion searches for the Bow of Epirus, an invincible weapon of legend created by Ares, God of War. With the bow Hyperion means to free the Titans from imprisonment in Tartarus, or so it seems, although to what end remains a mystery. What is King Hyperion’s relationship with the Titans: is it a coincidence that he shares the name of one of the Titans, or is he indeed an embodiment of the Titan Hyperion?

Immortals is directed by Tarsem Singh and produced by Gianni Nunnari, Mark Canton and Ryan Kavanaugh; the screenplay was written by Charles Parlapanides and Vlas Parlapanides; it stars Henry Cavill, Stephen Dorff, Isabel Lucas, Freida Pinto, Luke Evans, Kellan Lutz, John Hurt and Mickey Rourke.

If I have a lingering concern about this project it is that it will be converted to 3D in post-production. We can only hope that lessons have been learned from Warner Bros’s disastrous attempt to do the same with Clash of the Titans. The post-production 3D conversion of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was certainly an improvement, but even then the best that can be said is that the 3D was unobtrusive: it added nothing (which surely is the only justification for it) but neither did it significantly detract. In the final judgement that's not really good enough justification for converting to 3D. Still, with signs of improvement from one movie to the next, there's every chance that the conversion of Immortals will be worthwhile. if not, there's always the 2D theatrical option (or Blu-ray, of course!).

Immortals will get a theatrical release on the very memorable date of 11 November 2011 (11/11/11).

Here's the first full trailer:

Here's the original teaser trailer:

Or you can watch them all on the official Immortal's YouTube channel here.