Just like Frank Miller would a year later with “Sin City“, Enki Bilal put his own comic to film. Besides this fact, the two films have little in common.
In a fantasyfull future with magnificent 1950’ies looking flying cars virtually everybody had him- or herself manipulated. Lungs that look better, parts of the skull that have been replaced, etc. Also virtually nobody is ‘pure human’ since extraterrestrials have mixed with humans. The people in this film look pretty weird. So weird, that many characters seem to come from a computer. For a while I even wondered if I was watching an animation or a film. I do not like plastic looking characters on screen. Judging the list of actors and a couple of characters that do look (probably: are) real, “Immortel (Ad Vitam)” (as the full title goes) is ‘just’ a film with a lot of CGI. Then again, there is also an actor listed for “Horus”. I must add that the surroundings look amazing, so I do not but complain about the CGI, but people from a computer still are not my thing so to say.
So we have one alien-human-hybrid who is special: Jill. Another story is about a flying pyramid that actually houses three Egyptian Gods: Horus, Anubis and Bastet. Horus apparently needs a human body as host to conceive new offspring every now and there for he chooses Nikopol, a drop-out of the system. Very amusingly, Nikopol can talk to his inhabiting spirit, they can split from each other and rejoin and Nikopol can ‘use’ Horus’ abilities to fly for example.
All this does not really lead to surprising plot twists. Of course Nikopol and Jill meet. Jill is investigated by scientists, but this does not go as everybody hoped and she becomes a bit of a hero ‘in spite of it all’.
Story-wise “Immortal” (the international title) is an entertaining film. Visually it is wonderful too (safe the plastic people). It got some nice findings and humour. Not bad at all!
