Exodus: Gods and Kings, 2014
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Mendelsohn, Maria Valverde, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley
SYNOPSIS:
The defiant leader Moses rises up against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses, setting 600,000 slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt and its terrifying cycle of deadly plagues.
Imagine you have a stone. It’s a nice stone, it’s well formed and it does its job as a stone rather well. But what if you wanted that stone to be something it wasn’t? Say you wanted that stone to be a rock. What if you wanted it to be a rock so badly that you keep telling your friends and peers that it is, in fact, a rock. You tell them that it’s the biggest rock they’ve ever laid eyes on and it’s one of the best rocks ever. But no matter how you dress it up, it’s still just a stone. In the case of Exodus: Gods and Kings, the latest swords and sandals from Ridley Scott, it wants to be an epic. But no matter how it tries to tell us it’s “epic”, it just ends up feeling rather standard – like a stone.
Telling the biblical story of Moses (Christian Bale) discovering his true heritage and freeing the Hebrews from the tyrannical clutches of Pharaoh Ramesses (Joel Edgerton), Exodus: Gods and Kings is a rather bloated and badly paced movie that flits between being thrilling and intense to utterly boring and bemusing. There are no qualms about it, Ridley has gone big – but he hasn’t quite delivered.
To start with the positives, the acting on show from everyone on screen is pretty decent. Much has been said about the casting of the movie, but putting politics to one side, the display on show isn’t half-bad. Bale once again shows why he is a well-respected and loved actor as he brings Moses to life, but is better in the quieter scenes than louder ones. When the action engulfs him he can get lost in the shuffle, but when the movie dials back and lets him to do his thing, he’s really great. He’s no Charlton Heston, but then who is? Joel Edgerton also provides a fairly decent, if a little hammy, turn as Ramesses. He has a couple of great scenes with his young son, but the rest of the time he spends chewing scenery like the movie’s catering had run out of pork pies. You can say that the rest of the performances are good, but the film is built around Bale and Edgerton. The promotion and advertising can put names like John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley on posters and TV spots all they want, but they share a collective screen time that could give Bill Murray’s fleeting cameo in Dumb and Dumber To a run for its money. Are they fine in their roles? Sure. But they’re nothing to shout about.
Being that Exodus: Gods and Kings is an “old testament God” flick, there is a large amount of smiting, which comes in the form of the movie’s large “epic” set pieces as Scott depicts the ten plagues. This is when the movie is at its best and there are some of the plagues – the alligators in particular – are superb. They never take full advantage of the 3D (which is utterly useless) but Ridley knows how to make these look as good as possible. The parting of the red sea, which has adorned much of the promotion of the film, is somehow not as big and grandiose as its smaller scale brethren , but it still has some effect.
However, one of Exodus: Gods and Kings issues is that it never feels ‘real’. Like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, nothing feels tangible and everything has that CGI gloss over it that has ruined many a big screen “epic”. Ironic in a way that you can almost smell the sweat coming off the designers as they slave over their keyboards to make Egypt look as “real” as possible. Even in scenes where practical effects were used (the frogs for example), it all feels manufactured and it takes you out of any impact these scenes might have had.
But even if they felt or looked real, it still wouldn’t help the movie’s dreadful pacing and long periods of boredom. Exodus: Gods and Kings is 150 minutes long and while it’s not as mind-numbing as Transformers: Age of Extinction, it suffers from a lot of the same problems. The movie sometimes zips and zaps through time periods and then at other points drags its feet kicking and screaming. It’s as if Ridley Scott expected the audience to already know the story of Moses and therefore doesn’t need to explain certain elements of the plot. But if you are unfamiliar (or you’re stretching your mind back to your Year 9 Religious Studies classes), you would be forgiven for thinking you’d fallen asleep through some scenes and just not noticed. It doesn’t help when some of the movie is so utterly boring and the poorly rendered backgrounds are more distracting than the actors.
It’s hard to call Exodus: Gods and Kings a bad movie, because it really isn’t terrible. But it is very dull, very long and really badly paced. Some of the action set pieces are really cool, but the movie just isn’t as epic and grand as it keeps trying to tell us it is. A good Christian Bale and a handful of good sequences aside, there isn’t much in Exodus: Gods and Kings to write home about.
Unless you want to talk about the white-washed cast – in which case there is a whole tin of worms to open.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Luke Owen
You can listen to Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley and Andrew Tarbut talk about Exodus: Gods and Kings on the Flickering Myth Podcast using the player below:
