Exodus: Gods and Kings Reveiw (2014)

Exodus: Gods and Kings

 

  This film was a very mixed bag for me. While the cinematography, battle sequences, and scale of the sets were all extraordinary, you could just feel the bitter Atheism of Ridley Scott through his work. You could feel it as he made God a whiny, demanding, 11 year old, blonde, British boy. You could feel it as he attributes every single one of the plagues to science except for the death of the first born because of course God gets the credit for killing the children. You could feel it as he made Moses's character act like a barbaric, entitled, schizophrenic who hit his head a little too hard on a rock before seeing God and the burning bush. 

   Blasphemy aside, when you take away the very core of the Moses story, it loses all of the things that make it a great story in the first place. The best, most emotional parts were the ones accurate to the bible, like the last plague. Scott tried so hard for the red sea parting to look naturalistic that it ended up being just unsatisfying and anticlimactic in light of the rest of the story. It also bothered me that Ramases used a line from Gladiator twice. "He sleeps so well because he's loved" I get that it's the same director, but really? 

  It was a technically solid film, but it could have been sooo much better. The white-washed cast was very distracting (as much as I love the actors). It really took me out of the story. On top of all that, it didn't seem like the film focused enough on the horrors of being a Hebrew slave. If anything, I sympathized more with the Egyptians. I wanted to feel that intense motivation to free the Jews and it falls flat in it's delivery. A lot of potential, but it is ultimately uninspiring. I don't know what audience Scott was trying to market this film too. Bible readers who don't read the bible? 2 out of 5 stars. (It's Okay)