Last night I went to go see Immortals… For the amount of entertainment I got out of the film, I could just end the post here, but where would be the fun in that?

To say I was disappointed is a kindness that I’m not sure the film deserves. My problem is, I went in expecting it to be 100% knock-my-socks-off amaze-balls. It wasn’t. My socks were still on at the end. I keep forgetting that I mustn’t get my hopes up and then when a film like this is actually amazing (300 blew my mind!!!), my faith in filmmakers is happily restored. (Not sure if I like the fact that I am now blaming myself for all the bad films I’ve seen… must rethink this.)

Initially, I wasn’t expecting much. But then part of the marketing ploy of the studio was to say that Immortals was made by the same producers as 300. Did I mention that 300 blew my mind? It did. Now my expectations were high, very high.

I’m still not completely sure why Immortals failed to be awesome. It had all the right elements of an action epic:

Evil villain – check

Good looking heroes – check

Epic story of good v. evil – check

Thin storyline with vague references to history – check

So what happened? Well, first of all, the whole story was about finding this weapon of the gods – the Epirus Bow. I’ve never heard of it before, but I liked the concept of this really cool bow that doesn’t need arrows and is super powerful. But when they found it… It looked like the props people had let a 15 year old girl from the early 90s attack it with a monochromatic bedazzler. Not cool.

Couple that with the fact that the females in the movie were pretty much useless (even the goddess Athena was rather bland) and the reluctant hero wasn’t exactly believably reluctant. Oh, and there was a major flaw with the whole military strategy behind the big battle scene at the end which annoyed me no end. If I can spot that, as a a 20-something woman from the 21st century, then I think the scriptwriters and researchers for the movie should’ve seen it the issue. There was just too much meh and not enough “holy shit that was cool” for me to love this movie even a little bit, and I really wanted to.

I will say that Mickey Rourke was pretty bad ass and added a level of cool to the movie as Hyperion – the seriously disturbed bad guy. And Zeus, Apollo and Poseidon were cool when they were battling the Titans. These elements reminded me of the epic awesome that was so abundant in 300, but they weren’t enough to save Immortals unfortunately.

If you’re going to watch it, the effects are pretty cool and there are enough good looking bodies on display for men and women to enjoy to make it a passable 2 hours. Just don’t expect your socks to be blown off.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go re-watch 300 and remind myself of the awesome.