Exodus, shmexodus. Never has the Bible seemed so paper-thin as it does in “Exodus: Gods and Kings.”
In its effort to make an action drama of the complex, beautiful and mystifying story of Moses, Hollywood has released a 3D film long on atmospherics with mere rags and straws of wisdom and storytelling.
It’s not like theaters are so swamped with religious movies that we couldn’t use another, particularly a clear-eyed, atmospheric epic from director Ridley Scott. Once upon a time he gave us the lean and deft “Gladiator.” But while Scott’s Olympian esthetic is once again vast, his philosophy is slight.
Moses is imagined as if Scott met him on an awkward first date. He’s presented as a courageous hero, then as a holy fool directed by a dour boyish deity who may be an illusion. The one point of clarity about his decades-long rescue mission is how violent it is. It’s as if Moses’s acts were cannibalized for an expensive remake of “Mortal Kombat.”
There’s clearly nothing in the director’s mind except how the hordes of thousands should be whirling and thrashing in the next chariot fight scene. He believes we’ll never complain if we don’t understand the story completely, as long as there’s always something interesting happening on-screen.
The opening offers the first of countless aerial shots, presenting the Pharaoh’s ancient city of Memphis as if it was the dynasty’s haven for helicopters. That detached camera work fits the puppetry of the production. The ancient land is continually presented in glaringly thin long shots populated by countless tiny computer-animated denizens. The teeming inhabitants look as if they were put in place with digital tweezers.
Here live the old ruler Seti, his ambitious son Rhamses and Moses, discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter as a foundling on the Nile and considered her own virtuous son. They are played by New Yorker John Turturro, Australia’s Joel Edgerton and Welsh-born Christian Bale, members of the most globe-hopping, blue-eyed, accent-challenged crew ever cast as swarthy Semites. When Spain’s Maria Valverde, Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley join, the conversations sound like the UN lunchroom.
Moses, considered a second-string prince by the royal clan, is exiled when his Hebrew ancestry is revealed by a conniving viceroy (Ben Mendelsohn, working every line for sarcastic fun). He weds a desert sheep-herding wench, having a son before a head whack with a mountainside rock prompts his godly visions.
He returns home to lead his people to freedom, triggering Rhamses’ wrath so deeply he tries to shoot the evil eye through his generous mascara. Moses doesn’t part the Red Sea, have much in the way of a staff, or look a lick of 120 years old when he delivers his two stone tablets. Plus, looking constantly at the childish Old Testament God stand-in doesn’t give him so much as eye strain, let alone instant death.
Dramatizing events 5,000 years ago while omitting critical detail is not creative restraint. Here, it adds up to flagrant voids, giving us more an experience than a story. We see the film’s hero freeing the Hebrew masses from centuries of enslavement as Egypt is shattered by plagues of crocodiles, sharks, locusts, cold weather and deluges of preposterous acting. You get better historical vision from the Flintstones.
