Honestly, if you haven’t seen the Enki Bilal film Immortel, you’re missing out on one of the most beautiful, frustrating, and flat-out weirdest artifacts of 2000s cinema. It’s 2095. New York City is a crumbling, vertical mess of flying beat-up cars and floating pyramids. There are Egyptian gods playing Monopoly in the sky.
Yes. Monopoly.
Released in 2004 as Immortel (Ad Vitam), this movie was way ahead of its time, but it also feels like it’s held together by digital duct tape and pure, unadulterated Gallic ambition. Enki Bilal, the legendary Yugoslav-born French comic artist, basically decided to take his "Nikopol Trilogy" and smash it into a live-action-CGI hybrid before the technology was actually ready to handle his brain.
The Weird Tech Behind the Enki Bilal Film Immortel
You’ve got to understand the context here. In 2004, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the big "digital backlot" experiment. But Bilal went further. He didn't just want digital sets; he wanted digital people.
The film stars Thomas Kretschmann as Nikopol and Linda Hardy as Jill Bioskop. They are real humans. But they are surrounded by characters who are purely 3D-rendered, looking like something out of a high-end PlayStation 2 cutscene.
It's jarring.
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One second you're looking at Charlotte Rampling's incredibly expressive face (she plays Dr. Elma Turner), and the next, there’s a shark-headed mutant or a CGI senator who looks like he’s made of wet clay.
Why the visuals still work (mostly)
Despite the "uncanny valley" of it all, the aesthetic is pure Bilal. The colors are muted—lots of grays, blues, and that specific sickly yellow he loves.
- The World-Building: It doesn’t hold your hand.
- The Architecture: NYC looks like a layer cake of social classes.
- The Gods: Horus, the falcon-headed god, is a jerk. He’s a total ego-maniac who needs a human body to procreate because his fellow gods have sentenced him to death.
Nikopol is that body. Well, half of him. Horus literally replaces one of Nikopol's legs with a rail of iron. It’s metal. Literally.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Plot
People usually complain that the Enki Bilal film Immortel is impossible to follow. That's kinda true if you're looking for a standard Three-Act structure. It’s not a Marvel movie. It’s a poem about memory, genetic manipulation, and the literal weight of history.
The story follows Horus as he possesses Nikopol to find Jill Bioskop. Jill is special. She has blue hair, blue tears, and internal organs that aren't exactly in the right place. She’s the only one who can carry a god's child.
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It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. There are scenes that border on assault, which makes it a tough watch today. But it’s also weirdly romantic in a cold, distant way.
A Departure from the Comics
If you've read the Nikopol Trilogy (The Carnival of Immortals, The Woman Trap, and Cold Equator), you’ll notice Bilal changed a lot.
- The setting moved from Paris to New York.
- The timeline shifted further into the future.
- The ending is way more hopeful (or at least less bleak) than the source material.
The Legacy of a Digital Backlot Disaster
Was it a flop? Mostly.
It cost about €23 million—a huge sum for European cinema at the time—and didn't exactly set the world on fire. But its influence is everywhere. You can see DNA from this film in everything from Blade Runner 2049 to the way The Mandalorian uses Volume tech.
Quantic Dream (the studio behind Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human) actually worked on the digital renders. You can feel that DNA in their games—that obsession with "digital actors" trying to convey deep human emotion.
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Why you should care in 2026
We live in an era of "perfect" CGI. Everything is polished and focus-grouped to death. The Enki Bilal film Immortel is the opposite of that. It’s an auteur's fever dream that survived the transition to the screen with all its rough edges intact.
It’s a reminder that sci-fi doesn't have to be "clean." It can be grungy, confusing, and obsessed with Egyptian mythology for no apparent reason other than "it looks cool."
How to Actually Watch and Appreciate It
If you’re going to dive in, don't expect a masterpiece. Expect a mood.
First, watch it for the textures. Look at the way the light hits the floating cars. Bilal spent years painting these worlds, and he translated those brushstrokes into the digital atmosphere.
Second, pay attention to the music. Goran Vejvoda’s score is haunting. It fits the "falling apart" vibe of the city perfectly.
Third, don't worry about the "Why." Why is there a red shark-man? Because there is. Why is the pyramid out of gas? Because it is. Sometimes the mystery is better than the explanation.
If you want to experience the full scope of Bilal's genius, your next move should be to track down a physical copy of the Nikopol Trilogy graphic novels. The film is a fascinating experiment, but the books are where the real soul of this dystopian nightmare lives. Comparing the two is the best way to see how a creator's vision changes when they trade a pen for a computer mouse.