New IMMORTALS Trailer: Just Because Action Looks Cool Doesn’t Mean It Feels Cool

Every now and again I stand alone when it comes to movies. There are films that everybody else seems to love that leave me cold (and vice versa, of course) and movies where everybody else feels a palpable excitement while I just chuckle at the promo materials. Immortals is such a movie; everything about it looks beyond terrible to me, just a waste of time. And this new trailer doesn’t make me feel more positive.

What we have in this trailer is stuff that looks ‘cool’ and ‘beautiful,’ but in no way looks ‘thrilling.’ One of the problems with 300, the movie this is aping, is that Zack Snyder erred on the side of cool over thrilling a little too often. A good action scene should be viscerally exciting, not just painterly. But all we see from Immortals are these painterly images, none of which say ‘action’ to me. I am not excited by this stuff, I am not rooting for anything or anyone in the frame. There’s a distance between the action on screen and my appreciation of it, where the film is too caught up in the aesthetics of the scene to play the feeling of the scene. Maybe the actual movie is thrilling and filled with holy shit moments of action greatness, but everything that has been sold to me so far indicates that the goal is to make the action look cool but not actually BE cool.