Is "Gods of Egypt" a Bad Movie People Will Eventually Love?
Saturday, March 5, 2016 at 6:00PM 
The cast sees the reviews! The Horror. The Horror.The ill begotten would be blockbuster Gods of Egypt, directed by Alex Proyas (I Robot, The Crow), is currently enjoying a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; you could call that score bad luck but for the fact that the movie fully earns it.
Still... There's something enjoyable about tallying up the ways it goes wrong. It continually charges toward its own spectacular idiocy with gusto. Despite heaps of exposition it never makes a lick of sense, explaining rules only to break them. It mounts each action sequence with zero artistry in disguising its shameful lust to earn extra $ as a video game (you half expect congratulatory text and bonus points on screen a la Scott Pilgrim vs The World). It builds its own crazy as high as its in-movie Tower of Babel. It wants to play with surreal Egyptian imagery but is so 2016 that it mistakes human gods with animal heads for organic derivatives of Michael Bay's Transformers.
Each actor, freed from mundane concerns of "direction" or even other actors (green screens abound so half the time it's clear they're not together), does his/her own thing. The result is a hilarious hodgepodge of styles, accents, and wildly varying degrees of success at self-amusement: Egyptians with Australian accents? why not, Gerard Butler!; You once saw Pirates of the Caribbean and want to do something affected but can't quite commit to your mincing gay idea? Then do it half ass, Chadwick Boseman; You only want to entertain yourself? Thank you thank you Geoffrey Rush & Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. You are both having so much fun which is the only way to do a bad movie.
Maybe it's the time of year, the garbage dump month between serious adult films vying for metaphoric gold (it's just gold plating) and studio four-quadrant product vying for audience gold (the green stuff) but I found its monotonous/cheap aesthetic weirdly endearing; the sets and costumes are gold, the lighting is golden, some of the superpowers are fiery gold, and these Gods even bleed gold! This is not a recommendation so much as a "if you're in the mood for it" which I, surprisingly, was. It's a blockbuster dumb as Brenton Thwaites is twink pretty, but it just can't help itself.
Grade: C-/D+
Oscar Chances: Teehee. not even if 2016 ended today with only 40ish movies to choose from.
Reader Comments (6)
I just saw this at it was crazy! I can hear the pitch " It's clash of the titans with Egyptians".
I'm honestly super curious. The greenscreen comments sound like a hilarious element
You can't discuss the array of acting styles without mentioning whatever the hell Brenton Thwaites is doing. I think this guy is supposed to be the lead, but literally every line he has seems to be either whining or some kind of sarcastic remark (or both), all delivered in an unflaggingly chipper voice that completely undercuts the scenes trying to have some weight.
I was fascinated by how weird the end-points for many scenes are, and the transitions between them. Seeing it done this ineptly makes you appreciate the skill for doing it well.
Also, the presence of Courtney Eaton (whose cleavage is one of the film's more consistently entertaining elements) is ironic, given that she made her screen debut in Mad Max: Fury Road. Gods of Egypt is exactly the sort of weightless CGI bombast that made MMFR such a pleasant standout.
From my Facebook a couple of weeks ago:
"Alex Proyas' GODS OF EGYPT is fantastically terrible. I have to give some props to a film that so consistently finds new and extraordinary ways to be bad. No joke features some of the worst CGI I've seen in a major motion picture since... Battlefield Earth? Whose bright idea was it to cast Gerard Butler and Bryan Brown as brothers? Genuinely had no idea what was happening in the last 30 minutes. Chadwick Boseman's strange mix of queer and wise black man. The hodgepodge of races and accents. Whatever a "Brandon Thwaits" is.
Only genuinely good thing was Coster-Woldau's beefy legs in a skirt."
I actually did like that they bleed gold and the whole Geoffrey Rush in a space boat thing over a flat Earth thing was just... I dunno, I think it was imaginative.
The movie is in the classic Hollywood costume camp classics like Maria Montez "Cobra Woman", Lana Turner in "The Prodigal" not too mention all those Ray Harryhausen stop motion classics. The movie had plenty of eye candy- you can see were the $140 million budget went- and I agree with Glenn- the Space Boat thing was fabulous. Brandon Thawis is a pretty boy but his character "Beck" (!?) was too dull to be the movies main hero. The real mystery is how the writers of this epic keep getting projects green lighted- they have already given cinema such classics as "Dracula Untold" and " The Last Witch Hunter"- personally I can wait for the special blu ray edition.
Awesome movie. I had seen this movie. I am really great fan of Hollywood movie. Thanks