Exodus: Gods and Kings goes beyond biblical proportions
Starring Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton. Rated PG.
If there’s fun to be had in watching a remake, it’s in seeing what the filmmakers have done to alter and play with the well-known source material. A subversive spin can be at least as interesting as original material because of the editorial, critical angle baked right into the movie.
That adventurousness was never going to happen with Exodus: Gods and Kings. Christian viewers can be at least as picky as Star Trek fans when it comes to deviations from canonical authority. Indeed, director Ridley Scott came in for considerable pre-release heat for suggesting that the miracles witnessed by Moses might have quasi-natural explanations—a giant waterspout for the parting of the Red Sea, for example. (The film cheekily includes a character whose function at court is to explain to an increasingly perturbed and pissed-off royal family why the Nile has turned to blood and is emitting frogs, et cetera.)
Gods and Kings is otherwise a respectful retelling of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, pumped up with contemporary visual pizazz and a big-name cast. (Look, it’s Sigourney Weaver! Look, Aaron Paul!)
What surprises me is that the biggest name is something of a cipher. Christian Bale’s Moses is as fearless, driven, and cynical as his Batman. I guess it makes sense to have a stolid hero anchoring the supernatural effects extravaganza, but it’s not a feast of quirks like Joel Edgerton’s Ramses, who plays with and against the campy guyliner to show us both the cruel hardass and the loving friend. He also gets some dryly witty lines; when confronted by Moses with the demand to free the slaves, he replies with the evasive wonkishness of a contemporary politico: “From an economic standpoint, it is problematic at best.”
Morally, the Ten Plagues are even more problematic, and we see Moses wrestling with the effects that divine retribution is having on Egyptian civilians (the massacre of the Midianites being far in his future). Scott builds these scenes with tension, essentially creating a genre movie in the middle of his solemn tale. It’s the gross heart of an impressively watchable Bible epic.
Comments
2 Comments
Shane
Dec 14, 2014 at 4:53pm
For all the talk of how "fun" this film was and how "watchable" it is, I wonder if all the racism added to Ron's enjoyment? Clueless as ever, he's your worst critic.
Ron Y
Dec 16, 2014 at 11:12am
Thanks for reading, Shane!
I didn't say it was fun. I said it was watchable.
In a 300 word review, you leave out a lot of things you'd like to discuss. According to Ridley Scott, the racism totally adds the ability to watch the film at all (in that the financing would not have happened if these were Semitic actors speaking Pharonic Egyptian), but that was well aired everywhere else.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned to death is that Exodus's Moses cleverly panders to both religious and secular sensibilities. His arc is that he was a rationalist who scoffed at deities, who winds up being the confidente and general of God. Take that, Sam Harris! But he alone sees the Lord - other characters see him talking to himself, basically. So it is possible that he was having delusions, albeit powerful and coincidental with extremely odd phenomena.