Immortals (Tarsem Singh, 2011)

Dressing up 300's presentation ancient Greek carnage with even more slow-motion, gore and fussy but meaningless art direction, Tarsem Singh's Immortals represents a significant step backward for the director whose long-gestating labor of love, The Fall, made him an instant cult icon. Immortals, sadly, resembles more the director's prior The Cell, a thin, borderline offensive premise made both more alluring and more repellent by Singh's grandiose, immaculate designs. Most of the shots in this film display an intricate control of mise-en-scène, but the florid colors, precise blocking and refreshing use of tactile objects where possible only make it more frustrating that no one apparently stopped to take stock of how awful all those obsessively arranged objects were.

Awkwardly inserting itself between a revisionist exposé of how great but mortal deeds become godlike and an endorsement of supernatural mythology, Immortals never properly finds its footing. Vaguely retelling the story of Theseus (Henry Cavill), the film depicts the mythological hero as a peasant who has honed his fighting skills from childhood under the tutelage of a kind old man (John Hurt) who just might be more than meets the eye. Theseus' village, a stacked network of homes etched into a sheer cliff face near Mount Tartarus, comes under fire by Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), the king of Crete, who seeks to free the Titans caged in the giant mountain to bring about the death of the gods he despises. We soon learn that gods do indeed exist in this world, but despite the threat of unleashing the Titans, they force the humans to fight their battle for them.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a fear du jour-updating reboot of the apes-take-over-Earth franchise, has just enough creativity in it that its problematic whole is all the more frustrating. The only actor who genuinely fits into his role comfortably is animated out of the picture, while a good third of the film feels like padding to establish questionable, simplistic motivation for a primate proletariat revolt. Yet when the film clicks, Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds a surprisingly effective tone between the sentimental and vicious.

Swapping out fears of nuclear holocaust for the less definite disease paranoia, Rise of the Planet of the Apes repositions the root of man's fall as the noble but misguided attempt to alter nature. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist for a pharmaceutical firm who engineers a virus to repair the brain, effectively curing Alzheimer's and other brain-degenerative diseases. It's a lofty goal, and one that doesn't particularly need the addition of Will's Alzheimer's-stricken father (John Lithgow, making the most of an almost unwritten part) to sell the importance of such a breakthrough. But when an aggressive test chimp forces the closure of the research, Will secrets away the ape, Caesar, who inherited his mother's altered genes and exhibits intelligence even beyond that of a young human.