Theseus of the mighty thews

 
When Gay’s out of town I usually go to a movie that I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t like, and I think I scored big this time – “Immortals,” by Tarsem Singh.  I rather liked his cartoon “300,” which was faithful to its graphic-novel source.
 
In this case, though, the source was evidently “Bullshit’s Mythology.”
 
I was born in 1943, and that was a good year to be born if you wanted to see the epic movie “Ben Hur” at the hormonal age of sixteen.  But that set a glandular standard to which “Immortals” might not reach for a present-day 16-year-old.  He would be too jaded.  I am too jaded and a half-century older.
 
The girls are still great.  The guys are mighty-thewed and the blood is brilliant Type O.  Much more blood and entrails than Charlton Heston could whack out of his hapless enemies, given the primitive movie code of the day.  Theseus lugging about the Minotaur’s lopped-off head with its windpipe dangling out of the gore, that was a nice touch.  And the girls, wow.  Not to mention the women.  But nothing could rescue this Mulligan stew of a plot from feckless inanity; not even the gods themselves, who drop down to make house calls and lop the bejeezus out of subhuman drones.
 
They swing those heavy broadswords around like they were badminton rackets.  Wow, backhand!  They never miss until the plot requires that they slow down and bleed and grunt, which causes the enemy to respectfully move out of sight while they gasp unintelligible dialogue.
 
All building up to a transmogrificational ending that evokes the Old and New Testaments, Freud, Krafft-Ebbing, Dianetics, and “Science and Health With a Key to the Scriptures”!  Not to mention Atlantis and “The Titanic”!  You don’t get this stuff just anywhere.
 
Which is to say I enjoyed it, but wish it could have been a half-hour shorter.  With more girls. Maybe an extra box of popcorn; I was getting hungry.
 
To be a little serious, I guess I was lucky to have read Bullfinch’s Mythology in grade school, so I had all of these wonderful mental images before the cinematic ones came in to compete.
 
It was the biggest book I’d ever owned, at the age of nine or ten, and I read it with difficulty, and a dictionary.  But I remember how grown-up and challenged I felt when I unwrapped it on Christmas morning.  When I started reading it, I tried to incorporate some of it into the comic strips I was drawing – a plagiarist even at that young age! – but I think the Minotaur was beyond my skill.  (My characters were dinosaurs, with heads that were relatively easy to draw.)
 
You ought to see it if it’s your kind of thing.  Two thumbs off.
 
Joe