In recent years, superhero storylines and biblical narratives have become popular cinema fare. For all the depths that can be plumbed as to why the American psyche has returned to the familiarity of such timeless pathos, director Ridley Scott’s new film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, curiously rings empty.
The first twenty minutes of the film successfully portray an ancient Egypt, full of meticulous sets and costumes that firmly establish a world where prophetic vision interplays with pharaonic antipathy. The production quality is without flaw and the ancient Egyptian garb, makeup, and towering palace halls do well to impress.
Several elements of the film though work to lessen its effect. The casting of popular American actors works to diminish the realism that the film declares as its context, but not so much so that it sullies it beyond viewing. That happens later.
Moses is portrayed as brother to Ramses, advisor to Pharaoh, and military commander. All of which are plausible due to biblical silence on such details.
The rich text of scripture provides for epic cinemascapes, grand battle sequences, and dramatic intrigue that best any Hollywood script. But those always occur in the context of a greater spiritual engagement. Here, director Ridley Scott (Gladiator 2000, Kingdom of Heaven 2005, Robin Hood 2010) is lacking.
After Moses is found out by Ramses to be a Hebrew, he is exiled along with his family. Sigourney Weaver, who plays an awkward, near silent mother to Ramses, suggests that Moses be killed when Ramses declares his mercy upon Moses by casting him out in the likelihood that he will die in the wilderness.
There Moses meets his wife, Zipporah, who is insistently spiritual and presumes that their family will be also. She tells Moses that he’s confusing their son with conflicting thoughts on spirituality. This Moses makes it a point to be guided by reason and suggests his son do the same.
Then, chasing lost sheep, Moses is caught in a rock slide where he is hit on the head. After being injured from the fall, he sees a burning bush and a boy who identifies himself as “I am.”
Here, the encounter with God would seemingly be one that would warrant the utmost attention, hanging on to every word and gesture for some further discernment of the divine. But the director chooses to manifest God as a boy in the film; a manifestation that in itself is not inherently flawed. There are innumerable possibilities with the choice. But God is reduced to childish mannerisms and comments made with a delivery that borders on annoying.
It is difficult to know what the film is saying by this characterization; that God is an injury induced illusion or if real, exhibits zero capacity for empathy (biblically the reason for liberating the Hebrews in the first place.)
Moses, in a fevered fit of recovery, supposes to Zipporah that it was God that he encountered, but exhibits no spiritual acumen in doing so. The once highly spiritual wife earlier in the film, now uncharacteristically tells Moses that he’s just injured and doesn’t know what he’s saying.
Here the film starts to make its real message known (if it has one); namely that the supernatural is really only unexplainable natural occurrences. As yet, a major film telling a spiritual story has not taken such a path. It proves intriguing to witness how such an exploration of the book of Exodus will unfold.
Moses then takes up the task of a subversive revolutionary, committing acts of political violence to up-end the aristocracy, until he has a vision of or an actual encounter with God (It’s never clear), who tells him to watch the plagues that will soon descend on Pharaoh.
To turn the Nile red with blood, a squadron of crocodiles devours sailors and other crocodiles. When Moses and the Hebrews await intervention at the Red Sea, a meteor crashes in the watery distance and the sea parts as a direct result.
These events explained as realism can be believable enough. Nature exhibits wildly incredulous happenings daily. But when Moses and Ramses have a showdown in the middle of the Red Sea’s dry sea bed, waves towering a hundred feet or more crash and toss them effortlessly, and they both, without a scratch, reappear on opposite shorelines standing and staring contemplatively at the sea returned. The realism the film hinged itself on is lost.
Spectacle and realism in film function similarly to oil and water. What remains is as confounded and confused as the characters on either shore. The characters themselves, momentarily, seem confused and uncertain as to why the realism that led them to the dry bottom of the Red Sea is absent on its beaches.
The realism consequently feels reactionary and for all its spectacle, misses the point of the story.
Several pivotal scenes and characters are marginalized to one or two lines or are omitted all together. Aaron, Moses’ spokesperson, is essentially non existent.
To be fair, there is only so much a movie can show of the Exodus story before it becomes unwieldy and unmarketable.
But at a certain point, a different story is being told. An eighty year old shepherd with a stutter, who is in constant communication with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is quite different than the 40 something military commander who seeks to violently subvert the Egyptian autocracy to free people he shows no real emotion for because he got hit on the head and triggered what the film may be portraying as latent schizophrenia.
There is little to no spiritual engagement in the film. It seems to want to portray a logical Moses as a man who at best is upset with an illogical God or at worst is imagining that God exists. It doesn’t seem to want to say what its source material says.
Textual accuracy has always been a question posed to filmmakers. Does it matter as long as it’s entertaining? Perhaps it doesn’t if it is a further exploration of the story’s message, like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. But with Exodus: Gods and Kings, the question becomes how many times can a director make the same movie (Gladiator, Robin Hood) before it compromises the integrity and purpose of the source material.
Although the film’s premise is promising, its insistence on realism, at the expense of spirituality, can’t be taken seriously as a relevant contribution to cinematic exploration of scripture.
Review By: Nick Murillo