Exodus: Gods and Kings

Ridley Scott has directed sixteen major features in the last two decades. I’ve only taken the time to see seven of them. Sadly, the visually innovative British director of such diverse and groundbreaking films as Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and Thelma & Louise (1991) has become little more than a Hollywood hack. The influence of his spectacle-over-substance style helped create today’s cinematic climate where interchangeable blockbusters desperately try to outdo each other using the same limited set of tools. Still, when I heard Scott was making a big-budget biblical epic, it stirred my interest. Since the days of Cecil B. DeMille, large-scale religious pictures are, almost by definition, movies audiences embrace more for their campy, supercilious, and unintentionally hilarious qualities rather than their biblical teachings. Scott’s lack of humor and simple-minded approach to historical narratives (see: The Duellists, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Robin Hood) promised a return to the cheesy earnestness that makes films of this overblown genre into guilty pleasures for cinephiles.  Exodus: Gods and Kings does not disappoint in its ability to transform an ancient, culturally defining tale into a piece of silly, inconsequential, cornball entertainment. 

This year’s Noah (Darren Aronofsky’s tedious super-hero take on the bible story) set the bar low for religious epics.  Scott’s recent string of high caliber misfires—Robin Hood (2010), Prometheus (2012), and The Counselor (2013)—keeps expectations for his latest work equally meager. To win two stars from me, practically all Exodus: Gods and Kings had to do was not bore me to death. The film takes on the well-known story of Moses, the defiant Hebrew leader who challenged the mighty Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses, and led 600,000 Jews out of the bondage of Egypt, across the desert and the Red Sea, to the Holy land of Canaan. Scott and his four screenwriters dispense with telling the full story of Moses from birth to death, as DeMille did in his iconic, all-star version of The Ten Commandments (1956). Instead they focus on Moses’ transformation from a celebrated Egyptian warrior to the leader of the oppressed Jews. The screenwriters leave out the introductory chapter of this familiar tale in which the infant Moses is saved from the sentence of death imposed on all male Hebrew children by Pharaoh. Therefore we don’t learn how Moses’ mother placed him in a basket and floated him down the river to be discovered and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, until the character learns this information for himself.

The filmmakers enhance the personal rivalry between Moses and Ramses (raised as brothers from childhood and forced to become enemies as adults), so that the grand events in the movie come off as petty temper tantrums. The dialogue is flavored with countless contemporary phrases that feel laughably anachronistic. Likewise, scenes of palace intrigue and military strategy feel lifted from the scripts of sub-par cable dramas and fantasy shows. Then there is the jaw-droppingly offensive casting of all-white actors as the Egyptian characters. Whites play all the lead and supporting parts, with actors of color visible only in the ornamental, non-speaking roles of slaves, thugs, and rabble. How does this type of casting happen in 2014 when we have major stars of color that draw international box-office? I understand wanting Christian (Batman) Bale to play the brooding, self-tortured but still kick-ass version of Moses this picture depicts, but Joel Edgerton as Ramses? Edgerton is a fine actor (he doesn’t embarrass himself the way Joaquin Phoenix did in Gladiator) but popcorn pictures like these don’t require great acting—just take a look at how this film uses its two best actors Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver—animatronic dolls could have played their parts. I can envision a much more enjoyable version of this movie in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays the ruthless and stubborn Ramses. But, of course, one of the main ironic pleasures of this movie is its ludicrous casting. John Turturro, looking like Al Pacino in drag, plays the elder Pharaoh Seti I.  Aaron Paul, looking like Jesse Pinkman with a beard, plays Moses' passive to the point of irrelevance right-hand man Joshua. (I fear the only way Paul can overcome permanent association with his iconic Breaking Bad character is to get in a serious motorcycle accident and undergo reconstructive facial surgery.)

Scott’s storytelling skills were never his strong suit, but the way this film conveys its inspirational narrative is numbingly pedestrian. The characters’ external conflicts and internal psychological battles are portrayed in the most rudimentary fashion. The pacing is as inconsistent as the actor’s proto-British accents, and the epic plot lumbers along its unvarying linear trajectory with no surprises or intriguing explorations of detail. The “spectacular” sequences are the only places where Exodus: Gods and Kings delivers. Using every trick of CGI and 3D filmmaking, Scott and his team render immersive depictions of the plague of frogs, flies, and locusts, and they even add an additional animal attack scene not found in the bible. The climatic parting of the Red Sea, complete with a final mano-a-mano between Moses and Ramses, is equally exciting.  However, like the fake-tan bronzer the Caucasian actors seem bathed in, all this digital eye-candy fails to fully sweep us up in the picture’s manufactured grandeur. Exodus: Gods and Kings is unquestionably a bad film, but it’s not as pointless or insufferable as Scott’s Prometheus or the inexplicably popular Best Picture winner Gladiator (2000). Unlike that dull, pretentious, overrated historical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings won’t win any Oscars (it may even score some Golden Raspberry nominations), but this old-school Hollywood biblical cheez whiz is trashy and silly enough to amuse if you’re in the right mood.