Exodus: Gods and Kings

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian
Stars: Christian Bale (Moses), Joel Edgerton (Ramses), John Turturro (Seti), Aaron Paul (Joshua), Ben Mendelsohn (Hegep), Sigourney Weaver (Tuya), Ben Kingsley (Nun), Maria Valverde (Zipporah), Dar Salim (Commander Khyan), Golshifteh Farahani (Nefertari), Indira Varma (High Priestess), Hiam Abbass (Bithia), Tara Fitzgerald (Miriam), Isaac Andrews (Malak)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2014
Country: U.S. / U.K. / Spain
Exodus: Gods and Kings
Let my people go!Try as I might, there is only one moment in the entire 146 minutes of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings that I found truly memorable. After the Red Sea has come crashing back down after its miraculous parting and drowned the Egyptian army in its mighty wake, we get a nightmarish underwater shot of bodies, both human and equine, slowly drifting to the seabed amid shattered pieces of chariots and broken weapons. It’s a haunting, evocative moment of respite from all the hectic action that precedes it, and it provides in a singular image the real sense of death and destruction and power that the film as a whole often lacks, despite its depictions of war and plagues.

There was a time when Scott was a genuinely exciting director. Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) remain touchstones of not just the science fiction genre, but American cinema, helping to redefine visual style and storytelling in ways that made the careers of filmmakers like David Fincher and Christopher Nolan possible. Even though his heavily re-edited fantasy Legend (1985) was a massive commercial failure, hindsight shows it to be a bold, ahead-of-its-time endeavor that, whatever its flaws, was genuinely daring. He showed range in 1991 with Thelma & Louise’s female-centric reworking of the outlaws-on-the-run mythos, and while the ’90s was something of a mixed bag, even his flops offered something of interest.

And then he made Gladiator (2000), an sword-and-sandals reworking of virtually everything Mel Gibson had done better five years earlier in Braveheart (1995), and it won a bunch of Oscars, including Best Picture. Since then, with the exception of the wildly controversial Alien “prequel” Prometheus (2012) and a few oddball choices (2006’s A Good Year, 2013’s The Counselor), Scott has settled down into a depressingly rote series of grand-scale epics that have become steadily more generic: Kingdom of Heaven (2005), which blandly recounts the 12th-century war between Christians and Muslims for control of Jerusalem, the Scorsese-Lite crime saga American Gangster (2007), the drearily revisionist Robin Hood (2010). What is saddest about watching Scott’s films is that they no longer feel like the unique products of a great, imaginative mind. Rather, they feel more and more like filmmaking-by-committee: big, sprawling, CGI-heavy mega-movies designed to drown you in scope, but without the least bit of genuine imagination. There was a time when Scott challenged the limits of the medium itself. Now it feels like he just wants to give the audiences what the industry thinks they want.

And so we have Exodus: Gods and Kings, the latest Hollywood attempt to resurrect the big Biblical epics of the ’50s and ’60s with even bigger budgets and CGI-constructed vistas. Unlike Darren Aronofsky’s daring, unconventional Noah, which opened earlier this year, Exodus is very much in the Cecil B. DeMille mold, playing all the obvious narrative and thematic cards in recounting the story of how Moses (Christian Bale), a Hebrew raised by the Egyptian Pharaoh, learns of his secret lineage, is exiled from Egypt, meets God face-to-face, and then returns to demand that the Pharaoh releases the Hebrews, who have been enslaved for more than 400 years. And, like those DeMille epics of the Eisenhower era, Exodus casts Anglo actors as the Hebrews and Egyptians and offers only a smattering of darker skinned faces in the background as slaves and servants, a problematic, but hardly unexpected, approach that has mired the film in plenty of pre-release controversy involving charges of insensitivity at best, outright racism at worst. Whatever the filmmakers’ intentions, the racial issues only make the film seem that much leaden, unimaginative, and old-fashioned.

The screenplay, which was penned by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine, and Steven Zaillian, draws a great deal from the account in the Bible while also expanding the background story, particularly the brotherhood of Moses and Ramses (Joel Edgerton), who succeeds his father Seti (John Turturro) as Pharaoh and is responsible for first exiling Moses when he learns he is a Hebrew and then confronting him when Moses demands that he let his people go. Of course, this was done better and with more emotional conviction in DreamWorks’ first animated feature The Prince of Egypt back in 1998, but no matter. When it comes to Biblical epics, no story can be told too many times, and Scott is clearly eager to put the latest computer-generated effects to work, which is why we get so many sweeping aerial shots of vast Egyptian cities teeming with people and animals, leaving most of the drama to the background. You get the sense that Scott is much more fascinated by the intricacies of how scaffolding was employed to build massive statues than in God’s fraught relationship with His chosen people.

There are some effective dramatic moments when Scott brings his camera in and concentrates on the characters, and any time Christian Bale takes on a role, it is inevitable that he’s going to make it interesting. Bale’s Moses is certainly a portrait of conflict, and he goes through so many changes throughout the film (usually reflected in his increasingly hirsute appearance) that, by the time we see him in the final shot, when he is old and gray, there is a genuine sense of both exhaustion and accomplishment. However, too many of the other characters are given short shrift, notably Joel Edgerton’s Ramses, who never develops much of a personality, and Ben Kingsley’s Jewish elder, who is brought on screen a couple of times to lend gravitas. One is hard pressed to wonder why an actress of Sigourney Weaver’s caliber was brought in to play Pharaoh’s wife, since she has almost no lines and disappears early in the film (how much of her role wound up on the cutting room floor?).

The only truly inspired bit of casting is the use of 11-year-old Isaac Andrews to play Malak, an angel with whom Moses regularly converses. Scott has Andrews play the angel with a sneering, petulant tone, which certainly runs the risk of alienating, or at least offending, the Christian audience the studio is clearly trying to woo, but at least it represents some kind of daring. (You would not be out of line to think that Andrews is supposed to be playing God Himself, because there is only one throwaway line referring to him as God’s “messenger.” Otherwise, he appears in all the places in which the Bible has Moses speaking directly with God, including at the burning bush and the creation of the Ten Commandments. It’s not a big deal, but it still feels sloppy to be so unclear about who this important character is.)

That minor bit of controversy aside, Exodus: Gods and Kings is unlikely to ruffle any feathers, which is unfortunate—not because religious viewers need their feathers ruffled, but rather because the lack of ruffling is one more indicator of how generally unimaginative the film is. There was a time when Ridley Scott might have done something provocative and unique with the material, delivering a film of great visual daring and beauty. But, not now. Exodus: Gods and Kings, while never boring, is never inspired or arousing either, instead playing it safe in all the wrong ways.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © 20th Century Fox

Overall Rating: (2)




James Kendrick

James Kendrick offers, exclusively on Qnetwork, over 2,500 reviews on a wide range of films. All films have a star rating and you can search in a variety of ways for the type of movie you want. If you're just looking for a good movie, then feel free to browse our library of Movie Reviews.


© 1998 - 2024 Qnetwork.com - All logos and trademarks in this site are the property of their respective owner.