Immortals

It would have been so easy to make Immortals fun. It just needed to be brainless action strung on a shoestring plot with amazing visuals. The trailer led me to believe it would be just that, directly descended from 300. But a screenwriting committee-approved story killed this film. How could they make a brainless action flick so horribly, horribly boring?

All they needed to do was have this sort of plot: -

CONQUEROR ANTAGONIST [not Hyperion, cuz, y’know, he’s a Titan]: Hahaha, I am conquering! I kill your momma!
THESEUS: NOOO!
CONQUEROR: I also enslave you.
PROPHETESS: I help you escape! We go to a big city and rally an army!
CONQUEROR: Let battle commence. BTW I set free the Titans mwahahaa
ZEUS: Yeah well that means we can join the battle
[Rest of film is a huge epic fight full of eye candy and individually-characterised gods and titans!

Instead, we got long-winded quests after a McGuffin bow, different factions barely connected to one another, a hero who never seems like he genuinely ought to be a major character, a horribly shoehorned-in attempt to refer to the Theseus and the Minotaur story, lame titans and a very, very awkward love scene. And it all just went on and on and on. No strong characters, no moments of eye candy that actually raised a smile, and some extremely awkward extras placed right in the middle of the shot, once a guy failing to find someone to fight against and once someone really milking falling over after a gate exploded.

This should have been stripped down to the absolute basics and made silly, campy fun. Instead, the campy moments were way too camp and the rest was just dull, dull box-ticking which did not make anything remotely close to a good story. And whose idea was it to just abandon the battlefield to focus on two very small-scale fights was a master of building up expectations only to let an audience down. Nothing like it promised and nothing like what it could have been.