Ridley Scott rides a chariot into the choking flames of disapproval with Exodus: Gods and Kings; a film about the prophet Moses. Moses (Christian Bale), he who was saved from a massacre of first-born sons, a talker to burning bushes, leaves his Egyptian palace upbringing to wander the desert and lead people from slavery to safety in this 150 minute rehash of legends.
The biggest question is not how many people Scott has offended by rehashing this passage of the Bible/Torah, it is this: has he taken this juicy bit of storytelling and fleshed it out to its fullest, making an astounding epic to rival any epic ever made? The answer would be a resounding no.
Bale and his counterpart, Joel Edgerton who plays the reluctantly self-righteous pharaoh Ramses give competent performances but neither manages to inspire hatred, fear, awe or wonderment. The re-telling of this most famous of liberation tales is reduced to a sum of Bible parts; the revealing of Moses’ origins, his wandering, his finding and talking to the Hebrew God (as opposed to the Egyptian Gods), the plagues of Egypt, Passover are all spectacle-light, technically beautiful but mostly unmoving. Scott, like Bale and Edgerton, has produced something competent in reducing a literary spectacle to a logical, reasonable account of something inherently fantastical. Borrowing the bones of Gladiator (jealousy, a righteous challenger to the King, succeeding against all odds) but less successfully.
The cinematography by Dariusz Wolski is beautiful, as you would expect in a Ridley Scott film, and the costumes/make-up elaborate. On the outside, it seems as if all the details have been taken care of. That is, if you don’t know much about the history of the time or the colour of northern African skin. But what is a little whitewashing at this juncture; has not Jesus himself been depicted as Caucasian all this time?
It would be natural to wonder about Ridley Scott’s intention upon deciding to make a film covering one of the defining people, and moments, in more than one major religion. But it seems Scott’s overriding intention was not to question the nature of religion or to make a historically plausible but engaging biopic-like pic resembling the mighty epics of old. Scott has merely taken a ready-made hit from a widely read, popular story and attempted to transfer its glory from the page to the screen. Exodus: Gods and Kings is enjoyable enough and visually arresting but the screenplay is without much in the way of long-lasting substance.
Maryann has awarded Exodus: Gods and Kings (3D) three Torches of Truth
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