Culture from the darker side

It is always a tricky thing to move a comic book onto the big screen.

Most of the things that work well in one medium are hard to translate, much more so if the medium is already graphical in it’s story telling like a comic or video games.

It thus shouldn’t be too surprising that the number of good adaptations in this field is rather slim, much more so if you consider that most comic book authors / artists aren’t actively involved in the transplantation (with Sin City being a notable exception).

“Immortel (Ad Vidam)” is based on the three comic books of the Nikopol Trilogy created by Enki Bilal.

The Story:

New York 2095. In a strange pyramid floating in the sky, the gods of ancient Egypt are judging Horus. In the city, Jill, a young woman with blue hair is arrested. She has a secret power, enabling her to procreate with gods, but knows nothing of it. During his search for an hosting body, Horus runs into Nikopol, a previous rebel condemned to 30 years of hybernation and just escaped by chance. Horus takes partial control of Nikopol’s body and starts looking for a woman who can give him a son, before his death sentence is carried out.

How it’s made:

The movie is both amazing and strange at the same time.

The world of Nikopol is strange, it is anything but what we would expect, with strange characters, humans are changing their bodies and aliens are on the planet as well.

In order to accomplish this the movie makes extensive use of CGI characters, and also most of them are done well (and don’t suffer from the odd “helmet off” effect that happened in the latest Star Wars), but they still look artificial unfortunately.

The story itself was changed in order to work as a movie, but it still works and retains the core components of the story, which is most likely due to Bilal writing the story himself and also directing it.

The movie is strange and beautiful at the same time and for most people it will probably not be an easy movie to watch, if at all.
It clearly is not an american style movie and this may explain why the movie never saw broad distribution in North America which is actually a shame as it would have been a lot more rewarding to see the movie on the big screen.
But the DVD release has one advantage: You can watch it more than once, definetly something you should do.
If you liked the fifth element, you’ll like Immortel (Ad Vidam).
Rating: 5/5

heather champ has a wonderful blog on the web, which (even better) is under the Creative Commons License (like this blog).

I found the site via Jean Snow’s Blog.

What I find really interresting is that she is using pretty much “low tech”, Lomo etc. then scans and publishes it.

I like low tech, nothing better than seeing your own picture come out in the developer..