Exodus: Gods and Kings

The 2014 biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, actually had a big influence over how cinema would operate going forward, even if it was unintentional. While the film is notoriously known as a bad flick, it altered how people viewed historical epics, and demonstrated through its weak box office that people were no longer interested in these spectacle-over-substance movies, especially with a cast that didn’t portray the time period or culture they were set in. Even with how truly garbage this film is, that is a silver lining to take away from this awful experience.

In 1300 BC, Moses (played by Christian Bale) is a general who has been accepted as a member of the Egyptian Royal Family and just won a battle against an encamped Hittie army alongside his cousin, Prince Ramesses (played by Joel Edgerton). After going to the city of Pithom after Viceroy Hegep (played by Ben Mendelsohn) fears the slaves are planning a coup, a revelation comes after a slave elder named Nun (played by Ben Kingsley) tells Moses of his true Hebrew origins and how he actually came to live with the Egyptian royal family. Now knowing the truth and after being banished from Egypt at the urging of Queen Tuya (played by Sigourney Weaver), Moses travels the deserts until he decides to restart life as a shepherd and forms a family with a woman named Zipporah (played by Marie Valverde). After a few years pass, he encounters a messenger from God named Malak (played by Isaac Andrews) who tells him to return to Egypt and free the slaves who are now living under the much harsher rule of Ramesses, who is now Pharoah. As he refuses to back down in spite of Moses’ protests, a plague is sent onto Egypt, and more lives will be threatened and lost unless Moses’ (and by extension God’s) demands are met.

With sloppy directing, unengaging visuals and spectacle, a horrible script, and actors that are miscast in practically every sense of the word, Exodus failed to impress anyone and stood as an example of why never to make this kind of film in this manner ever again.

This film was seeped in so much controversy leading up to its completion, and a lot of that came from the manner in which the story was going to be told, and who would be cast in the roles. The biblical story had been portrayed several times throughout the years, with the most famous examples being the 1956 iteration of The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and the 1998 DreamWorks animated movie, The Prince of Egypt, with both standing as very faithful but also very different portrayals of the tale, so this movie would need to find a way to faithfully emulate the same kind of energy and appeal without feeling like a direct copy. The idea of altering the story doesn’t have to be awful, but the way in which this film muddies the tale becomes so apparent and so unlike what it’s representing, that it starts to paint an ugly picture of how the people behind the scenes viewed this story. Director Ridley Scott was very open about his atheism and how he tried at every opportunity to find a natural explanation for all the miracles that occurred in the biblical tale, which seems beyond bizarre as it not only leaves out several impactful visuals and moments that are synonymous with the story as well as push away the Christian fan-base who should be the target audience, but it also just makes the movie less of a biblical epic and more of a sub-standard epic, which were long dead by this point (even though Scott continually tries and fails to resuscitate them).

While Scott made some successful epics in the modern day like Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, it’s a formula that can’t survive on scale alone anymore, and that can be felt all throughout this movie by how outdated a lot of the tropes and cinematic tricks feel. The actors are all incredibly monotone, it’s a pretty ugly movie even though it’s showing off biblical-era Egypt, and ironically within a religious film, it is such a soulless experience to witness. It’s simultaneously too slow and too fast at the same time, breezing through important plot and character moments to the point where it’s hard to get invested in anything that’s happening, while also trudging through meaningless scenes at a snail’s pace to drag the film out to over two hours in length. The script by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine, and Steven Zaillian is really awful, with dialogue that feels too modern and bland to work for something that should have an ancient lyrical dialect, characters that are played as so moody and cold that it’s hard to like or care about anyone, and a structure that doesn’t offer anything new for casual movie-goers or anything faithful for religious audience members.

One of the biggest complaints this movie was faced with was its casting, with many claiming they were whitewashing the story of Moses by getting mostly white actors for a lot of the leading roles. This has happened in the past several times before (even The Ten Commandments did this), but while movies of old existed in a different time, the progress made in today’s society doesn’t make this okay anymore, and seeing all these white actors playing people of either Egyptian or Hebrew descent is just baffling and embarrassing to look back on now. Even removing the race issue, these choices are just bad from a character standpoint, as no one feels like they capture the roles effectively. Christian Bale feels like he’s not even trying to capture Moses, instead playing him like a deranged constantly shouting mad man with no real tact for control or even peace. Moses as a person could’ve been flawed, but the level in which this movie paints him as this brutal cold-hearted, almost schizophrenic monster just feels off and is another factor that turned a lot of Christian viewers off. Bale is trying, but it feels aimless and like he’s doing whatever he wants rather than what his character would do.

Joel Edgerton is painfully awful as Ramesses, taking a character that should be so complex, flawed, and tragic, and turning him into a mumbling, stilted and generically boring figurehead who has zero charisma, no engaging dialogue, no entertaining relationships to witness, and acting that is just laughably bad (even ignoring how ridiculous it is to expect the audience to buy him as an Egyptian). People like Ben Kingsley, Hiam Abbass, Indira Varma and Isaac Andrews aren’t bad, but are used so sparingly that you forget they’re even in the movie, John Turturro, Ben Mendelsohn and Sigourney Weaver are so distractingly out-of-place in this environment that it’s honestly embarrassing, and Aaron Paul is given roughly four lines of dialogue and yet still delivers them poorly (he didn’t even need to be in this movie). These are talented actors, but they’re used is such a bad way that doesn’t play to their strengths, that it just results in a bad time all around. The only one to come out of this with a shred of dignity is Maria Valverde as Zipporah. She is literally written out of the film around the halfway point, and her and Bale have zero chemistry, but her delivery at least sounds genuine, and she doesn’t look out-of-place in this location or time period, so she has that going for her.

Since the movie is going for an epic presentation, the least it could do is provide some visually interesting and dramatic sequences, but it can’t even get that right. You can feel in parts where it has a slight scale and it deserves some credit for some of the practical effects work and naturalistic film which can makes things feel more personal and raw, but everything else is just underwhelming, whether it’s the unimpressive visuals effects (which look pretty bad for what is supposed to be a $200 million budget), limited scope and stakes, lack of originality in the visual department, or just the overall ugly design. The film is shot in a hazy, dreary manner that makes every section look drab, colourless, and unpleasant, with the dark blue hue over the nighttime scenes and the harsh grey and white over the daytime scenes making everything look and feel miserable, and it even hurts a lot of the production value.

The production design by Arthur Max isn’t bad and some of the sets in Egypt look like decent replications of the time period’s architecture, but they’re never shown off in an interesting way, so it just looks like any standard royal palace. Same can be said for the costume design by Janty Yates, with outfits that have the right look and feel, but the muted colors just leave them looking like generic props rather than elaborate decorative garbs. The cinematography by Dariusz Wolski never shows off the action or even the environment in a noticeable way, leaving everything looking the same regardless of where the characters are in the moment, and outside of a few shots showcasing the river of blood (which comes from crocodiles and fish this time), none of them really capture the size or even visual grandness that this story requires. Even the music by Alberto Iglesias just feels like a generic score for this kind of movie and the only moments when it stands out is when its obnoxiously in-your-face with its backing choir, which is a little annoying but isn’t as frequent as other offenders.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a prime example of an outdated style of movie-making that was able to fool people before through its spectacle and flashy visuals but has now become less impressive in the modern age and can no longer survive on sloppy seconds. Even old film epics have more of an impressive size and atmosphere for something done so long ago, whereas movies like this just feel like lame excuses to stick with bland scripts, safe actors, and done-before stories. The film may not be anger-inducing or create the same amount of pain that other truly awful films can cause, but the level of bafflement surrounding its choices in front of and behind the camera, as well as just how little it gives you when watching, leaves it with nothing worth being proud of. It won’t please religious individuals, it won’t please average movie-goers, it won’t please fans of movie epics, it won’t even please fans of ‘’turn-your-brain-off’’ movies, it didn’t try and work for any of its watchers and therefore, works for no one. When the animated musical starring Jeff Goldblum is more complex, Shakespearean, tragic, emotional, epic and memorable than a big-budgeted star-studded motion-picture epic led by a big director, something is definitely wrong.