Exodus: Gods & Kings

Synopsis: The story of how Moses (Christian Bale) rebelled against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton) and led 600,000 Hebrew slaves on a journey of escape to Canaan. 

Ridley Scott takes on Cecil B DeMille and loses in this artificially bloated remake of the latter’s 1956 classic The Ten Commandments.  Whilst the film is technically impressive and in terms of visual effects well outstrips the final work of that pioneering figure of Hollywood spectacle, Scott seems to have failed to realize that simply inflating something already big to even bigger proportions courts ridicule. What worked 60 years ago with real sets and thousands of extras to shock and awe audiences does not have the same effect today when CGI blockbusters are a dime a dozen and, perhaps even more importantly, there is not the consensual Christian belief system to govern reception of what is one of the key legends of its pre-history. After Life Of Brian you can’t make a film like this and expect to be taken seriously.

Had Scott and his team of writers balanced the gargantuan scale with a compelling character drama the film might have worked but the only element that comes close in this respect, the relationship between Moses and his adoptive brother, Ramases, is dealt with in an, at best, perfunctory way as a grim, intermittently recurring face-off. The rest of the characters are left with walk-on parts that amount to very little and in many cases like Ben Kingsley as a Hebrew elder and Sigourney Weaver’s Queen Mother, nothing at all.

Although Bale has the lion's share of the screen, given Scott's broad strokes approach, there is no opportunity for him to make the role his own as did Charlton Heston in the DeMille version. Taking on the Yul Byrner part, a shaven-headed Joel Edgerton is much more impressive as Ramases, although his character is never adequately motivated.

As with the original version there is an insurmountable incongruity between the historical and cultural context of the events and their modern day telling. In this respect Scott stays surprisingly close to 1950s Hollywood conventions. Some of the actors like Edgerton and John Tuturro make an effort to simulate some generic Middle Eastern accent, Bale less so and Weaver doesn’t even bother. For some reason God, or his emissary, is played by a pre-pubescent boy with an English public school accent.  There is some fun had with the casting though. Ben Mendelsohn (and my, hasn’t his American career blossomed in recent times) plays a camp viceroy and in the oddest casting of all, Ewen Bremner, the Pharoah’s court scientist.

In the tritest of ways when, after being exiled, Moses stumbles into a goatherd’s camp he meets a doe-eyed beauty (a girl, not a goat) and marries her almost instantly. Some of the dialogue is ludicrously anachronistic (for example when Moses suggest to Ramses that he should pay the slaves, Ramases replies :”From an economic standpoint that would be problematic”). Or in place of dialogue Scott falls back on significant looks between characters. There must be at least a dozen instances of one character nodding knowingly to another.

Whilst Scott's film briefly touches on interesting material, particularly, as its sub-title indicates, the supposed wisdom of gods and kings, it is indeed but briefly, the director's generic blockbuster approach subsuming all under an avalanche of CGI.

The ending, which has Ramases washed up on a beach and Moses scratching out the Ten Commandments seems to be pointing to a sequel. If America's Bible belt endorses this chapter it may happen, but on the basis, of what we've seen, it seems unlikely.

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