Exodus - Gods and Kings

I like Ridley Scott movies for the most part.  You know ... Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down.  Each outstanding in its own way.  The first two - Alien and Blade Runner - among the best science fiction movies ever made.   Blade Runner in particular is just about my favourite movie of all time.

Even those of his movies I think of as second tier - Matchstick Men, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster and Prometheus - are good movies in their different ways.  Films that most Directors would be very pleased to send out into the world.

So I'm not quite sure what I can say about Exodus - Gods and Kings, which I saw this evening.  Spike was attending a function at the Canberra Glassworks so I took myself off to Hoyts at Woden in the Westfield shopping mall, which looks like a location from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange; one that the great director rejected because it looks far too bleak and inhospitable even for a 1970's dystopian fable of a bleak and inhospitable future. 

But back to Moses ..

Who's that standing next to Ellen Ripley?

Disappointing?  Would that be the word?  Bombastic, tedious (at times ... too often ... I'm sad to say I found my mind drifting off to check out the curtains every now and then), poorly written.  It's less engaging than Charlton Heston in Cecil B De Mille's The Ten Commandments (and I never imagined I'd find myself writing those few words) and just plain bizarre in places

... casting John Turturo as Seti and Sigourney Weaver as his wife and the mother of Ramses?  ... crocodiles cause the plague of water into blood? ... and despite the Biblical assertion to the contrary (Exodus 14:28) Pharaoh survives the return of the Red Sea waters?

It's an odd film.  

As you would expect with any Ridley Scott movie it's visually arresting and, at times, beautiful.  The landscapes are spectacular and awe-inspiring; beautiful but harsh and unforgiving - Old Testament vistas in which a man could easily die or wander in the wilderness for days or decades.

Blade Runner does Memphis at night

Memphis is magnificently rendered (although the residence of Ramses looks suspiciously like the Tyrell Corporation HQ in Blade Runner).  The quarries of Pithom take your breath away.  Believe me, you would not want a summer job there.  The plagues make your flesh creep. Locusts? Don't like them.  Rotting fish? You can smell them.  Frogs in your bed? Yeuch!  Christian Bale is a believable Moses.  And as bizarre as John Turturro may be in the role of Seti you kind of accept it, although you do wonder how such a delicate, refined man could have fathered the brute force that is Joel Edgerton's Ramses.  Sadly, however, you can never suspend disbelief when the Pharaoh's mum appears on screen.  You just keep thinking, what's Sigourney Weaver doing here?

On the down side?  Well the whole thing runs out of steam as soon as we've crossed the Red Sea.  It felt as if the director no longer had any interest in the rest of the story ... there would be fewer big money shots maybe. 

Or ... Psychology 101 here ... the brother narrative severed by the return of the unbridgeable gulf of the sea, Sir Ridley's enthusiasm waned.  There's a brief stone carving scene inside a cave on Mount Sinai while craven images are worshipped down below and a peek at an ancient Moses sitting with the Ark of The Covenant in a covered wagon then we're done.  Roll credits.

The two hours and thirty minutes seem much longer.  The conceit of casting God as a somewhat spoilt and impatient 10 year old boy wore thin after a while. Ben Mendelsohn's Viceroy Hegep is written / presented like a Saturday morning cliffhanger baddie - ready for a boo and hiss every time his rolling eyes and sneaky glance appear before us. 

Maria Valverde as Zipporah

Ben Kingsley gives us a decent enough wise old man in the first half but is reduced to a wordless starer into the skies once the flight from Egypt gets underway. And whatever happened to Moses's mum, sister, wife and son?  They do their exposition bit then vanish from the screen.

So ... Exodus - Gods and Kings? Definitely not in the top rank of Ridley Scott films and struggling to hold on to the second tier too.  If I was asked for an opinion on where to spend your movie ticket dollars this weekend I'd tell you ... somewhere else.

PS. There are a couple of interesting points in the screenplay which, I think, show that with a bit more work, some more rigorous development, there could have been an edgier film drawn out of this Cecil B De Mille lite offering.  Early on in a war planning room Seti asks his advisers if the Hittite army massing on the border of Egypt poses a threat.  No one can tell him.  It's possible, advises one, they're marshalling a defensive capability - not an invasion force - because they're worried Egypt will attack them.  Seti sends in his armies anyway.  Iraq anyone?  It's hard not too see the analogy for modern pre-emptive defensive strategy (as our modern Imperialists like to put it).  And later, when Moses has risen to his leadership role, there is a discussion about the tactics his newly trained army will prosecute to secure freedom.  Moses explicitly rejects action against military targets.  Instead he organises an insurgent, guerrilla, terrorist campaign against civilian infrastructure, property and people.  Had the rest of the screenplay been as comfortable with risk taking we might have had a magnificent movie.  But sadly no.