Exodus: Gods and Kings is a 2014 epic directed by Ridley Scott and starring Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver.
This film has got to set some kind of record for most violent acts against horses. I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to any kind of film violence, but a couple of scenes in this had even me shaking my head. I don’t mind big battle scenes where men on horseback charge each other and both men and steeds are killed in the ensuing chaos. I don’t mind it because I’ve seen it in so many movies it barely even registers anymore and my reptilian brain knows it’s all just foam latex and CGI.
But there’s two scenes in Exodus that feature horses getting slaughtered for no apparent reason. The first is the tidal wave that comes to swallow up Pharaoh’s army after Moses has parted the Red Sea. For some reason, Ridley Scott decides to have a horse bolting away from the wave, and we see the damn thing get washed away quite brutally. Was this to show the force of the wave? The height of the wave? It’s a goddamn tidal wave. We know it’s big and powerful because thirty seconds later we see a freakin army get swamped by it.
The second is Moses’ horse after he’s been swamped by the wave and Moses washes up on the beach. For some insane reason he looks out into the water and we see his horse being ripped apart by sharks. The scene is not overly gory, it’s just maddeningly unnecessary. It serves absolutely no purpose in the film.
Anyway, unexplained gratuitous equine violence aside, on to the film. Ridley Scott is my all time favourite director. I think he’s brilliant, unique, extremely talented and makes interesting, thought provoking and entertaining films.
So it pains me to say that I didn’t enjoy Exodus: Gods and Kings. Aside from some brilliant production design and some few-and-far-between moments, for the most part the film is confusing and dull.
Although it clocks in and over two and a half hours, it seems like a 4 hour film that’s been massacred in the editing room. Characters make unexplained decisions that make little sense, transitions between locations and scenes are sometimes jarring, an early plotline goes nowhere...the list goes on. The entire second act of the film is just a jumbled, confusing mess. No sooner could I latch on to the story and settle in, thinking it was finally going to make sense, the film would transition to something else and never resolve the thought it began. Watching the film is sort of like trying to carry on a conversation with someone in the latter stages of severe dementia. They can’t keep a train of thought, trail off in the middle of sentences and tell stories that don’t have points or conclusions. The film had four screen writers, two of whom did rewrites, and it shows.
And, it’s like Ridley Scott has a deal with the studios – they get him to whack a big set piece battle at the beginning of his films, and then once that’s out of the way he’s free to make the film he actually set out to make (see Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood). The battle at the beginning of Exodus is easily the best part of the film, unfortunately aside from setting up a sort of rivalry between Ramses (Joel Edgerton) and Moses (Christian Bale), it has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It’s completely abstract from everything that follows. What’s more, it doesn’t even set up the rivalry all that well. At least in films like Gladiator and Robin Hood the battles at the start had some place in the overall story. They made sense.
Not much in Exodus makes any sense. As I’ve said, it seems like a much longer movie that has had huge chunks of exposition excised. Probably the most jarring example of this is Moses’ wedding. In the space of about ten minutes of screen time, he’s gone from being exiled in the desert, to being taken in by the villagers, to being madly in love and married. It’s incredibly rushed and doesn’t allow you to invest at all in his wife’s character or his relationship with her.
Slightly less jarring but nonetheless confusing is Ramses sudden decision to not trust Moses after Moses has returned from Pithen with the Viceroy. At least during this scene Moses seems as confused as I was that he was suddenly ejected from the room with all the servants leaving Ramses and the Viceroy to scheme and plot his exile. I get the basic gist of it, but again, the whole sequence leading up to Moses exile to the desert seems horribly rushed.
The film has some good points. As we’ve come to expect from Ridley Scott, the film is visually stunning and extremely well made. Everything about the film is polished – the production design, the costuming, the special effects. It has some superb stunt work and stunning visuals involving large scale battles and sandstorms. And of course the plague of locusts, the Nile turning to blood, all that stuff looks awesome. The panoramic shots of Alexandria and Pithen are an incredible blend of model work, practical effects and CGI. I really struggled to tell where the real and the fake merged. Ancient Egypt has never looked so amazing, and so real. It’s really brought to life.
The performances are mostly good. Christian Bale has become adept at playing characters who are batshit crazy yet relatable and that we can sympathise with, and he does that to its full effect with his portrayal of Moses. Joel Edgerton is also good. He’s not among my favourite actors, but he plays Ramses as scarily intimidating yet childishly pathetic. It’s a nice performance. And John Turturro is fantastic as Seti. He’s not in the film very long, but he’s a joy to watch in every scene he’s in.
Another performance worth mentioning is God-kid. Firstly, I loved that Ridley Scott went with neither man nor woman to portray God. He threw a kid in there. This could have been laughable, except that the child actor is incredible. He’s by turns menacing and benevolent, often both in the same breath. I really can’t do the performance justice here, the kid is simply brilliant.
Ridley Scott dedicates the film to his brother Tony, who tragically committed suicide. Knowing this at the end, the scenes between Ramses and Moses suddenly took on a deeper meaning. I wish he had of spent more time on the relationship between these two men than on trying to make a Biblical epic in the vein of The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur. This was two and half really disappointing hours.
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