'Exodus:
Gods and Kings': Film Review
The Bottom Line
Ridley Scott shows off his gifts as director, but the script
and some of the actors let him down.
Opens
Friday, Dec. 12 (20th Century Fox)
Cast
Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben
Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver
Director
Ridley Scott
Ridley
Scott's rendering of the Book of Exodus serves up most of the spectacular
highlights of the Biblical tale
2014 marks the resurgence of the Old
Testament at the movies. After Darren Aronofsky turned to Genesis to unleash Noah, Ridley Scott moves forward to the Book of Exodus to
revisit the story of Moses. Exodus: Gods and Kings is this century’s
answer to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, but it already
looks to be more controversial than that pious 1956 opus. Spectacularly filmed,
intermittently well acted though not quite as much campy fun as the DeMille
version, the picture looks likely to attract a substantial audience even if
some religious leaders voice protests.
Scott did a great job reviving the
Roman sand-and-sandals epic when he made the Oscar-winning Gladiator.
This Egyptian saga is not quite in the same league, but it confirms the
director’s flair for widescreen imagery. Exodus has the added kick of
3-D technology, and it has enough eye-popping set pieces to please adventure
fans.
Unlike the DeMille rendering, this
one does not begin at the beginning but plunges us into the middle of the
action, with Moses (Christian Bale) as an adult in the royal court. We
eventually learn the back story of how the Jewish child managed to find a home
among the kings, but we’re introduced to him as a warrior and best friend of
Ramses (Joel Edgerton). The first part of the movie cribs rather shamelessly
from Gladiator, which began by sketching the rivalry between the
emperor’s son and his favorite warrior. Here the aging Pharaoh, played by John
Turturro, prefers his adopted son Moses to his own son Ramses. This
tortured family drama was performed much more persuasively in Gladiator
by Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix and Richard Harris.
Despite an excess of mascara, Turturro is sympathetic, but he doesn’t fit all
that comfortably into ancient Egypt.
An early battle scene against the
Hittites, modeled very closely on the climactic battle scene between Arabs and
Turks in Lawrence of Arabia, suggests that Moses is the superior
warrior, which prepares for his eventual banishment once Ramses succeeds his
father on the throne. But the friendship between the two soldiers is not well
established in the opening scenes, so the film stumbles out of the gate. Four
writers — Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and
Oscar winner Steven Zaillian — are credited with the screenplay, and
they haven’t been able to craft an elegant narrative from the Biblical text.
Their dialogue is often cringe-worthy, as when a surly Moses tells God, “Nice
of you to come.”
When Moses learns his true identity,
he is reluctant to play the role of savior, and he finds a comfortable home in
a remote village, where he marries and has a son. But his destiny calls when he
comes upon the famous burning bush and is approached by God to lead his people
out of slavery. Here is the film’s most controversial choice, for God appears to Moses as a
fierce child. Although this may offend some
devout viewers, it’s actually far more interesting than the booming offscreen
voice that DeMille used in his version of the story. This divine child seems
angry and vengeful rather than a benign Buddha figure, but one could argue that
this is in keeping with the Old Testament God of wrath.
The film hits its peak in the
sequence recounting the ten plagues. The savage crocodiles were not in the Old
Testament, but as they attack humans as well as fish, they turn the Nile blood
red, which is at least an ingenious explanation of how the river might have
turned to blood. Frogs, boils and locusts are truer to the text and are
rendered in luscious visual detail.
The climactic chase to the Red Sea
is equally spectacular. Although The Ten Commandments won the Oscar for
its visual effects, the parting of the Red Sea in DeMille’s film was laughably
tacky. Scott comes up with a somewhat more credible portrayal of how the
Israelites managed to cross the sea before a monumental storm drowned the
Egyptians. This sequence is visually thrilling. The movie should have ended
there, but Scott and the writers seem to have felt obliged to include a few of
the later parts of the story, including the delivery of the Ten Commandments
and a scene of an aged Moses finally arriving near the land of Canaan. But
while these events are integral to the Biblical story, they come off here as
the worst kind of anticlimax.
Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski
and production designer Arthur Max make impressive contributions, though
some of the aerial shots of the Egyptian capital look a little too much like
CGI-enhanced sets. Alberto Iglesias’s score is overly bombastic.
Don’t expect any acting nominations
for the picture. Bale garbles a few too many of his lines, but he has an
imposing physical presence. Edgerton is competent, but we miss the hammy
exuberance of DeMille’s Ramses, Yul Brynner. Ben Mendelsohn,
however, has fun with the role of the sniveling, treacherous viceroy who
exposes Moses’ true heritage. Ben Kingsley adds gravitas as the elderly
Jewish leader, but most of the other actors are stranded with far too little to
do. Sigourney Weaver is completely wasted as Ramses’ conniving mother, and Breaking
Bad’s Aaron Paul barely registers in the underwritten role of Joshua. Maria
Valverde is strikingly beautiful as Moses’ wife Zipporah, but her role is
just as skimpy as most of the others.
No movie with such a limp ending can
be fully satisfying, and the beginning also falters. But the long middle
section is a rousing good show.
Cast: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton,
Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Ben Mendelsohn, Maria Valverde,
Golshifteh Farahani, Indira Varma, Hiam Abbass.
Director: Ridley Scott.
Screenwriters: Adam Cooper, Bill
Collage, Jeffrey Caine, Steven Zaillian.
Producers: Ridley Scott, Peter
Chernin, Jenno Topping, Michael Schaeffer, Mark Huffam.
Director of photography: Dariusz
Wolski.
Production designer: Arthur Max.
Costume designer: Janty Yates.
Editor: Billy Rich.
Music: Alberto Iglesias.
Rated PG-13, 150 minutes.
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