Review: Exodus: Gods and Kings
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 at 4:00PM 
Michael C here to look at an embattled new wide release.
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings is so dead in the water, so consistently baffling in its choices, that it is difficult to know where to begin. How about the simple fact that when one is adapting the Old Testament there is no getting around God?
Gods and Kings doesn’t go so far as to omit God altogether. The Lord is present (sort of) in the form of a petulant eight-year old child who first appears from behind the burning bush to issue vague marching orders to Moses. What Scott and his quartet of screenwriters do attempt is an end-run around the almighty in the form of an ill-considered attempt to wedge the Book of Exodus into the Batman Begins mold where all the miraculous events are brought down to Earth with realistic explanations, or at least semi-plausible interpretations.
Is God really talking to Moses or is Moses talking to himself because his exile knocked a screw loose? Does God intervene at the Red Sea or did the Jews get lucky with a fortuitous low tide? [more...]
It’s a bizarre choice that clashes violently with the material. You can get away with gritty revamps of Superman or Snow White, but the Old Testament? If the presence of the divine is not genuine we are left with the story of a kooky prophet who hit one hell of lucky streak. What exactly is the point? That Scott and company only half-commit to this idea suggests they never found an answer. By the time the angel of death is descending on Egypt like the UFO shadow from Independence Day, the concept has been so thoroughly abandoned, one can’t help but wonder why it was introduced it in the first place. Perhaps the filmmakers were simply desperate to justify this film’s existence beyond the naked attempt to shake down churchgoers for the change in their pockets.
The idea of Gods and Kings as some kind of modern, not-your-grandfather’s Ten Commandments is a particularly rich bit of hypocrisy since Exodus amounts to little more than a riff on that Cecil B. DeMille staple. Rather than do its own world-building, Exodus carelessly hacks 90 minutes of screen time out of the 1956 version, patching it back together with clunky dialogue fixes meant to fill in all the epic storytelling you are not seeing. Characters spend a lot of time clarifying plot points the script failed to make clear in earlier scenes, like when Ramses claims that his mother (Sigourney Weaver) has always had it in for Moses even though Weaver is little more than a mute prop for the first 45 minutes of the film. Much of the plot, from the rivalry between Moses and Ramses to Moses's rushed romance and marriage, is covered in this "Wait, did we forget to mention this important plot point" fashion.
I’m no great fan of the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments, but at least DeMille had the conviction of his hokey beliefs. Exodus doesn’t believe in anything except maybe the overseas box office value of large scale CGI destruction. It shuffles lifelessly from scene to scene with a lethargy better suited to portraying forty years wandering the desert, rather than the epic tale that precedes it. Its biggest innovation to the DeMille version is to drain it of all its delirious high camp folly and overwrought melodrama. You know. The fun.
As for the actors, if you are one of the many perplexed by the sight of Christian Bale as Moses, Bale’s performance would like you to know it also has no idea what it is doing here and sure would like to be anywhere else. The actor is lost in a role that requires him to go from pragmatic leader to fevered prophet and back again without a logical progression or connective tissue. The familiar fall and rise of the Moses is absent, replaced by an overriding confusion shared equally by Bale and his character. The result is a feeble Moses who shrinks in stature the more epic weight he is asked to shoulder.
As for Joel Edgerton’s Ramses it feels like an act of the purest cruelty to compare this performance to Yul Brynner's delicious showboating. Edgerton’s Ramses is a non-entity who can scarcely wrestle the spotlight away from his own eyeliner. A fine actor, Edgerton is swallowed up in the production, left to scrape together what few moments of prissy Boy King brattiness he can while trying to rescue some of 2014’s ripest dialogue. When faced with the famous command to let the Jewish people go, Edgerton is left to put the best possible spin on, "From an economic standpoint alone what you are asking is problematic to say the least." It’s hard not to feel for the guy.
I had mixed reaction to Aronofsky’s Noah earlier this year, but at least his film grappled with the material head on. When the Bible portrayed a gleefully homicidal God, Aronofsky spat back an image of Noah as unhinged doomsday cult leader, skulking around the ark with madness in his eyes, threatening to murder his soon-to-be born grandchild on sight. Exodus has a similarly murderous deity at its center but it skirts the story’s darker subtext retreating into the safety of bland spectacle. And what charge could be more damning for Exodus: Gods and Kings than blandness? This movie takes a saga that encompasses everything from babies set adrift in baskets to Shakespearean sibling rivalry to the wrath of God, and reduces it all to a soulless CGI shrug.
In one of its biggest divergences from tradition, Gods and Kings portrays the parting of the Red Sea as such a nonevent that Moses manages to sleep through the start of it. I know how he feels.
Grade: D
Reader Comments (13)
Michael. Don't hold back. Tell us what you really think. (G)
(Honestly, didn't we all see this coming from the trailer?)
"Oh, Moses, Moses, Moses...."
I was obviously angry at the film from the get-go for casting white actors as EGYPTIANS, and then Ridley Scott's blatant disregard for the backlash ("I'd never get funding with actors of color, so it was never a question"), so I'm glad to see it's such an awful movie on top of that.
Philip H: Between this and The Last Airbender, the growing lesson is "if they white wash, it won't matter anyway."
Forget this film. So let it be written. So let it be done.
Did Christian Bale read the script? Did he really need the money?
This review makes me so happy. No way will I ever watch Exodus: Gods and Whitewashing.
Let's not forget that Moses' wife's entire plot line revolves around some recited chant about giving Moses permission to have sex with her (even if the words of said chant have been actively and overtly betrayed by him. Bonus points for "sexy girl who giggles when stared at" to harpy "don't do the brave thing"--as Emma Thompson brilliantly described it--wife). And then Rames's wife's plot line is a spectrum of lying in bed sexily, getting scared out of bed, and insanely rocking an empty cradle. You nailed Weaver's part though: mute prop. I mean the men on screen EXPLAIN to us how conniving she was. Because that's, you know, way better than having to hear a woman talk. Because ugh what a drag that would be... Clearly women don't do things other than sex, sacrifice and forgiveness (with nary a word!) ****shakes fists at movie****
Catbaskets - I've never read that Emma Thompson description before. That's brilliant.
Rest assured. I could have easily gone for another 2000 words detailing the ways this film falls on its face. I didn't even get to mention that there is a damn TRAINING MONTAGE in the middle of this movie for some bizarre reason. As if Scott wasn't satisfied making one terrible Robin Hood re-hash, he had to morph the Moses story into one for a few scenes.
Michael, maybe after watching this, The Counselor ain't so bad? LOL
I mean I could have forgiven the training montage if they had at least been singing "I'll make a Man out of You" from Mulan. Sadly, no.
Apart from TUSK, it's the worst film I've seen this year. Completely terrible in every way. Even ignoring the race element (which is inexcusable, really, in casting a man named Christian as Moses), the film is homophobic, too. At least in BEN-HUR and SPARTICUS, the directors were putting in subversive queer elements. How have directors regressed in that regard? The Ben Mendelsohn character is appalling.
I keep seeing pictures of SigWeave in this movie, but fairly certain she wasn't actually there. Does she even have a single line of dialogue? The red sea! Illogical. Some shots the water is crashing in one direction and in another shot it's crashing in another direction.
I think, worst of all, is that the film is *ideologically* offensive. Ridley Scott is an admitted athiest, and he even has a character tell us that how all of the plagues could be natural occurrences, but he ditches the concept of an athiest retelling of a "bible" story, which could have been fascinating, and instead adheres to religious doctrine.
Glenn -
I didn't get to Mendelsohn because the review was already running long, but you are dead on. I couldn't quite believe what I was watching.
And that back and forth on God was truly maddening. Why bother to come up with a plausible Red Sea parting if you are going to turn around and hit both leads in the face with a ridiculous 1000 foot wave and have them both live? And what the hell was up with that last scene where Moses was carving the Ten Commandments himself? Why are they carrying on like it's still ambiguous when God had already blatantly intervened a dozen times?
I have successfully avoided Tusk so far but for me this is right down there with Let's Be Cops, Spider-Man and Sin City for bottom of the barrel this year