EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS Review

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If the world didn’t already have enough low-angle close-ups of Christian Bale’s thousand-yard stare, rejoice! Sir Ridley Scott’s latest picture gives us another 154 minutes of them. Bale’s steely, expressionless acting turns out to be a perfect match with Scott’s steely, expressionless direction. Scott seems almost helpless to the tedium endemic to the plots of sword-and-sandal epics, a category whose resurgence Scott helped birth with Gladiator and whose shortcomings are epitomized by Exodus: Gods and Kings.

The worst parts of Exodus come in the expository doldrums marking the film’s first act; the film flits around with the Big Themes that the Book of Exodus set the groundwork for in the Western literary tradition. Yet even with four writers working on this film’s script, it stretches the theme of inheritance extraordinarily thin. Moses vies for Egypt’s throne; instead, he follows his bloodline to lead the Hebrew, and the rest is history.

The fun only begins when plague strikes Egypt, beginning with several dozen alligators mauling Egyptian vessels and turning the entire Nile red with blood—as if by miracle! Of course it’s overblown, and thank Dog for it, because only for the most thuddingly overblown spectacle, Ridley Scott finds his visual acuity once again. Scott’s vision of the 10 plagues is utterly grisly and often chilling.

Scott’s full-scale tableaux are often striking, with a notable interest in the power of symbolic gestures that brings to mind Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii. Pompeii tells much the same story as Exodus, another parable of revolt en masse in the face of otherworldly destruction and without the hour of dead expository weight that makes sitting through Exodus so taxing. Yet Exodus has the advantage of some incredible production. The grandiosity of Egypt’s terrain and architecture is only matched by the consistently eye-catching costuming and make-up. Because, hey, when white people play dress-up as chosen people, better that they be dressed up well.

Many have rightfully raised the issue that Exodus casts almost exclusively white actors (including such talents as Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver) in Egyptian speaking parts. There is already enough illogical anti-Semitism in America, despite Judeo-Christianity’s irrefutable Semitic origin. Though the Hebrews get their vengeance on their Egyptian captors, precious little is said for the black slaves who adorn Pharaoh’s palace as hardly-even-glorified set dressing. Exodus: Gods and Kings ought to remind us about our culture’s failure to reject our beloved “chosen people” narrative. It might make for memorable mythology, but it inevitably allows us to subjugate others.

Today, there are still countless movie nerds hoping for another Alien or Blade Runner from Ridley Scott, and I have to pity these people. Sure, Scott still has a great cinematic sense about him, but as Exodus: Gods and Kings proves, this hardly translates into the vibrancy that made him the exciting director he was in the 1980s.