EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
CAST: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, Sir Ben Kingsley, Hiram Abbas and Indira Varma
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG V
RUNNING TIME: 150 minutes
RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
RIDLEY Scott’s latest would-be blockbuster is one of those films that works better if you don’t think about it, but just let it roll over you. If you could experience it in a total vacuum, if you didn’t know the story of Moses and the cursed Egyptians, this could maybe work.
Close scrutiny of the film-making process and the plot just break it down though – whether it is the issue of the all-white cast for a story set in a place and time that wasn’t peopled by Caucasians, anachronistic dialogue or the way the story simply glosses over the humans and concentrates on things.
Unlike the Old Testament source story, the Egyptians get all the sympathy here and God is not simply a voice in the darkness, but a personified entity.
This is not the story of how Moses (Bale) discovers his faith in the God of his people, or how he delivers said people from the bondage of slavery. (Come on, one of the best lines from the Bible is “let my people go” and they don’t use it.)
This is the story of the nasty things that happened to the Egyptians that led their God-King Ramses (Edgerton) to chuck those pesky Hebrews out of his country. And, the subsequent snit Ramses had that led him to chase said Hebrew people across the sea.
Scott goes for epic spectacle over actual story. He shows us the story on a huge scale with vast aerial shots of ancient Egypt’s pyramids being created, and amazing detail, but he somehow manages to miss the human element.
At the heart of the story we should get Moses and Ramses raised as cousins in the royal court of Seti (Turturro) and schooled to rule.
We know how this story goes from Sunday School and Scott follows the basic premise, making both main characters men who don’t really have that much faith in their family’s gods, but Ramses’s position is divinely mandated so he knows how and to whom to kowtow. Moses has the more tricky time of it, trying to understand a culture in which he didn’t grow.
Or at least, that should be the story, that is where the drama should lie, in the human interaction. Instead, we get apocalyptic plagues of literally Biblical proportions, big battle scenes and lots of whining Egyptians with boils.
Characters are sketchy and one-dimensional and we know why they do stuff because we know the original story, not because we see their motivations or realisations play out in front of us.
Unlike Darren Aranofsky’s Noah, Exodus isn’t so inventively outre that it peeves off the Christians for being blasphemous. Nor is it dramatic enough to engage you on an emotional level. It is melodramatic at times, and somehow rushes through the story despite a running time of more than two hours.
It is visually splendid, but where is the angst, the stirring inspiration, the poetry or even the soul?
If you liked, Prometheus or Oblivion, you will like this.