Exodus: Gods and Kings
I couldn’t miss another Ridley Scott spectacle, so we took the plunge tonight. Scott got on my list way back when with one of my favorite flicks of all time, Blade Runner, but it’s been uneven for a while with his movies. I was aggravated with him over his Lovecraft-tinged Prometheus, which seemed to suck the life out of a film version of At the Mountains of Madness (a closely related plot line) but other epics like Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven made me curious enough to see what Scott could bring to this sequel to the Bible and The 1956 Ten Commandments. Lots of issues come up here, notably casting the Welsh Christian Bale as an ancient world middle eastern hebrew Moses (and Aaron Paul as Joshua?), just who gets to play God and how and an Australian (Joel Edgerton) as Ramses. Of course, the other question is whether to stick to the biblical story (quite an epic itself) or let Scott indulge his own fictional aspirations, as he did with Robin Hood or and Roman Emperor Commodus in Gladiator. The answer is that it’s a mixed and often messy spectacle.
The story mostly follows the plot line of the 1956 Ten Commandments (and at least some of scripture), but takes considerable liberty with some events and phenomena so if you’re interested in some strict telling of the story, you will probably be vexed. TTC was one of the great FX extravaganzas of its era, but suffered badly from static, stilted acting that resembled the worst of the silent movie era. Exodus errs by indulging in little in the way of character development (the old TTC was better at that) in favor of FX laden plagues and marching Egyptian soldiers. One might also ask about Moses’s speech since the Bible implies that he was a stutterer. While Charlton Heston was a stilted booming orator, Christian Bale is more of an under-actor and mainly a poor communicator, but never a stutterer. And then there’s God. Back in 1956, Hollywood mogul Cecil B DeMille insisted on being the voice of the invisible God. There’s no invisible God in Exodus, however. Instead we get a 10 year old boy that nobody else can see, with patchy hair and an ironic attitude. That really did NOT work well…taking commandments from an invisible boy? What? I’m not sure just how to portray God, but this isn’t it.
I won’t bother you with a plot summary since I guess most of us know the story, nor will I make much of an effort to avoid spoilers, since I think we all know how the story ends. Fortunately Scott did not stray too far as far as he got. The ending was rather strange and abrupt. Once the sea closed on the Egyptian charioteers, the pace speeded up….we’re here now in the Promised Land, everything’s fine, story over…5 minutes….not much drama at all over the commandments or the rest of the journey. The plagues were rendered convincingly, except that Scott somehow decided to add a plague of crocodiles, which seems too easy to avoid…just stay away from the river. The film also is full of architectural problems, notably pyramids right in downtown Memphis, a Giza pyramid looking like they do today, minus the smooth exterior that’s due to thousands of years of stone plundering, statues that are way too big, etc.
With all that, did I like it? I guess the answer is yes, not because it was a good telling of the story, nor because of the acting or much else except the spectacle. Nobody ever has accused Ridley Scott of being a small thinker, his movies are huge in concept, even when the concept is weird (like the plague of crocodiles and the closing of the sea, rendered as a tsunami) and I enjoyed wondering just WHAT would happen next. I will probably keep seeing his movies, but yikes…what a strange mess.
