General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Immortal (2004 film)

Immortel (ad vitam) is a 2004 French science fiction film directed by Enki Bilal, loosely based on the first two volumes of his comic book series the Nikopol Trilogy, La Foire aux Immortels (1980) and La Femme Piège (1986). Set in New York in 2095, it follows the Egyptian falcon-headed god Horus, who has seven days to preserve his immortality by fathering a child with a human woman, using the body of an escaped cryogenic prisoner named Nikopol. The film mixes live-action actors with computer-generated characters and backgrounds and was one of the first European features built on that scale around a digital backlot.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Immortel (ad vitam); international title The Woman Trap; released in Japan as God Diva³^•⁴
Director and writers	Enki Bilal (born 1951 in Belgrade), co-writer Serge Lehman⁵
Release	24 March 2004 in France and Belgium; runtime about 102 to 103 minutes³^•⁶
Main cast	Linda Hardy (Jill), Thomas Kretschmann (Nikopol), Charlotte Rampling (Elma Turner), Thomas M. Pollard (Horus), Frédéric Pierrot (John), Yann Collette (Froebe)⁷
Budget	About €23 million, an English-language French, Italian, and British co-production⁸
Visual effects	390 fully computer-generated shots, 500 shots combining live action and CG, and 280 composite shots; more than 1,400 effects shots created, 1,160 in the final cut²
French box office	843,105 admissions in France⁶
Reception	25% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (8 reviews) against 53% on the audience Popcornmeter; 5.9/10 on IMDb from about 22,000 ratings⁷^•⁹

Spoilers

Plot

In 2095, a pyramid floats above Manhattan, home to Egyptian gods who condemn Horus to lose his immortality. Before this takes effect he is allowed seven days on Earth. He must find a woman capable of bearing a god's child, and he takes over the body of Alcide Nikopol, a dissident frozen for thirty years in a geostationary penitentiary who escapes when his cryogenic pod breaks loose and lands on a New York bridge. The woman is Jill Bioskop, a young mutant with blue hair and blue tears and no known origin, whom Horus must seduce within his deadline. The city around them holds an election campaign, a serial killer searching for a healthy body, and a corporation called Eugenics; the film's tagline material describes a world where the voices, bodies, and memories are rigged, everything except love.¹⁰^•⁸ Screen Daily described the premise as a futuristic take on the Greek myth of Amphitryon, in which a god takes a mortal's form to father a child.⁸

Origin and adaptation

Bilal, a French comic book author and director of Bosnian and Czech origin, had already made two features, Bunker Palace Hôtel (1989) and Tykho Moon (1996), and won the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême in 1987 at age 35, still the youngest recipient of that prize.¹ When producer Charles Gassot approached him in 2001 about adapting La Foire aux Immortels, Bilal doubted the project could be done, since his graphic style seemed unsuited to a traditional feature film; the prospect of computer animation changed his mind.² Rather than a direct adaptation, Bilal described the film as a revisiting of the Nikopol Trilogy, arguing that three albums could not be fitted into a two-hour film; he kept elements of the comics but did not want the actors to resemble the drawn characters.¹¹ He began developing the project in 2002 under the title Nikopol Immortel ad vitam aeternam.¹²

Production and visual effects

A digital backlot production. Production began in the summer of 2001 with a long design and storyboarding period. Bilal required the CGI to be "Bilal-real" rather than photoreal, and the design of 2095 Manhattan was deliberately based on the present day, with the street level raised by 50 stories so that people enter buildings at what was once the 50th floor. Illustrators drew real New York buildings, converted them into half-textured CG models, and Bilal painted futuristic additions directly on printouts.²

The work was carried out at Duran Animation Studio, a subsidiary of the French effects house Duran/Duboi, using Maya for modeling and animation, LightWave for rendering, and the proprietary Dutruc system for compositing. Visual effects supervisor Jacquemin Piel called it the biggest special effects film ever made in Europe, and nothing of that scale had previously been attempted in France.²

Previsualization. Piel's team wrote new software to build a 3D storyboard of the entire film, and he contended that Immortel was the first movie ever to be completely previsualized in 3D. Camera moves, lenses, and angles were fixed in advance and sets were output as construction blueprints; only actor movement was left free. Bilal cut the whole film before a frame was shot, updating the cut as shots evolved. Only four physical sets were built (a bedroom, a bathroom, a bar, and part of a subway station); the rest was shot on a stage covered in green material. Principal photography finished one hour behind schedule.²

The characters fell into three categories: the gods, human-like figures with animal heads; mutants and aliens deformed by genetic experiments; and normal humans. The first two were generated by computer animation, with Bilal preferring CG over prosthetic makeup so the creatures would match the film's graphic style.²

Reception

The film opened in France on 24 March 2004 and took around $2.8 million from a 400-screen rollout in its first week, near the head of the French box office.⁸ It finished with 843,105 French admissions.⁶ Screen Daily's review praised the visual blend of live action and CG as one of the more credible strip-to-screen makeovers of recent years while calling the script the film's Achilles' heel, strewn with subsidiary characters that distract from the main narrative.⁸

Critical aggregate scores were low: 25% on the Tomatometer from 8 reviews, with reviewers calling the story incoherent and the effects dated, while the audience Popcornmeter stood at 53%.⁷ IMDb users rate it 5.9/10 from about 22,000 votes.⁹ AlloCiné shows the same split, 4.1 from 19 press reviews against 2.3 from more than 3,600 user ratings.⁶ The film received one César Award nomination, for production design.¹³ A 2015 academic study of digital-backlot cinema grouped it with Casshern and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as mid-2000s hybrid films whose digital humans were judged to fall into the uncanny valley, though it noted the two films' failures differed in kind.¹⁴

Legacy

Immortel is remembered as an early and ambitious experiment in immersing flesh-and-blood actors in fully computer-generated backgrounds, made at the same time as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) and Casshern (2004).¹⁵ Retrospective assessments describe it as technically dated but a genuine curiosity of European science fiction cinema whose universe retains a personality that costlier productions never achieved.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026