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Exodus: Gods and Kings: Computer Images Great, But Film Lacks Spiritual Grandeur
By Sandra Olmsted
Director Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings lacks the spiritual majesty and mystery of Cecil B. DeMille’s original Biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, and figuring out where the blame lies doesn’t provide much of a problem.
Writers Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine, and Steven Zaillian seem to use Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince as a Biblical text and don’t use much of the Biblical account of Moses leading Jewish slaves out of Egypt. Like Scott’s version of the plagues, one directorial choice after another leads to natural consequences. By making the relationship between Moses (Christian Bale) and Ramses (Joel Edgerton) too similar to the one in Gladiator, Scott unsuccessfully returns to the battle-based plot of a rivalry between an emperor’s favorite warrior and the heir apparent to the emperor’s throne.
Scott’s focus on this single relationship also under uses the incredibly talented cast in roles his screenwriters stripped of all importance; however, Scott abandons the key relationship between Ramses, now Pharaoh, and Moses, now leader of God’s enslaved people. The one-time “brothers” share too few scenes during the plagues. Scott explains many of the plagues, such as the Nile running red with blood until the hordes of flies, as natural phenomena and natural consequences.
Although the CGI (Computer Generated Images) in the plague sequence is well done, these plagues lack context because Moses hides rather than confronts Ramses. The lack of confrontation also means that several plagues go unexplained as how they occurred “naturally” or how Moses and the Jews knew to protect themselves. While the modernization of characters’ dialogue and emotions makes even Ramses more appealing to a modern audience, Scott’s intense focus on humanizing the characters deprives them of spiritual motivations and the film of a logical plot.
In some ways, Scott spent his rumored $140 million budget well. By combining excellent, state-of-the-art CGI and special effects will huge casts and beautiful sets, Scott gets a realism that rivets the audience in many ways. The realism and the special effects in Exodus: Gods and Kings evoke the Biblical spectacle films of the past, but Scott’s lack of spiritual understanding most egregiously plays out in the music which often evoke the diabolical chanting in The Omen franchise. Why would Scott take on the remake of a beloved Biblical epic only to either ignore or undermine the spiritual dimension of Moses’ quest for not only a personal identity but a belief in God?
The final plague upon this film comes in the form of a petulant God (Isaac Andrews). While the novelty of portraying God as a child could have worked, Scott chooses to portray God as though he is the enigmatic boy in the famed French novel. To challenge Moses’ skepticism in the same way as de Saint-Exupéry’s stranded pilot has his understanding of the “grown-up” world challenged by the Little Prince reveals Scott’s self-proclaimed agnosticism, which makes him a poor choice to direct a Biblical epic.
Explaining the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea as natural phenomena eviscerates the grandeur of God delivering His people out of Egypt. No amount of incredible special effects, casts of thousands, or high production values can restore a spiritual grandeur that Scott cannot conceive of existing.
The controversy over Scott casting white actors as characters who were not white plays as slight of hand to distract from the other problems with the film. That includes the 150-minute length of the film and its inability to enthrall gives the audience time to wonder such odd things as “This is Egypt; where are the camels?” Rated PG-13 for violence including battle sequences and intense images, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation release, opens Dec. 12 in theaters.
