During the Christmas season, we tend to see an uptick in New
Testament movies, largely focused around the birth of Christ. Early this year, we saw the Old Testament get
a little representation with Noah,
and now we’re turning to the second book with Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. But where I
appreciated Noah’s steps away from
the source material (odd though the rock monsters may have been), Exodus turns out to be too devoted to
the text without taking advantage of the technical and narrative innovations
the film teases.Christian Bale stars as Moses on the eve of his step-brother Ramses’s (Joel Edgerton) ascension to the throne of Egypt. After the revelation that Moses was born a Hebrew slave leads to his exile, a visitation from God (“I Am,” in the persona of a small boy) compels Moses to return to free his people, with ten plague-shaped assists from the heavens.
The first thing about Exodus is that it’s very competent. Scott’s direction of the action scenes recalls his good work on Gladiator, and the plague scenes are terrifying for their computer-generated precision. And of course Bale is doing his usual top-quality work in a performance as Moses that sees him undergo at least two distinct physical changes, two major philosophical paradigm shifts, and frequent conversations with thin air that lack no conviction.
Edgerton is a great Ramses, as well, and the scenes leading up to the plague of the first-born are highly effective. It’s a shame, though, that some of the editing in the film turns his public executions into punchlines, compromising a more nuanced performance by equating it with mustache-twirling villainy. Exodus recovers with a strong supporting cast, including Ben Kingsley, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, and John Turturro as Seti I.
These are all great performers, but they’re not given terribly much to do. Kingsley is basically shorthand for gravitas, meant to lend weight quickly to the Hebrew elders, and he manages to check off another ethnicity on his career’s bingo card without having much to do outside of two or three scenes. Ditto for Paul, whose role as Joshua should have been the Robin to Bale’s Batman, so to speak, but he’s mostly set dressing with an unconvincing accent. Weaver and Turturro are out of the movie in about twenty minutes; a subplot in which Weaver wants Moses dead peters out rather quickly.
The idea that Ramses’s mother is plotting behind his back to assassinate her stepson is a fascinating one, but the film doesn’t know what to do with it. This is actually a major problem with Exodus because it has so many opportunities to make an original stamp on the Moses story, but it never commits to any of those. The apparent emphasis on the brother relationship between Moses and Ramses seems like the centerpiece of the film, but it too fades away, never really delivering on even the basic comparison of the two men as leaders of opposing armies (teased by an opening shot of a priestesses reading offal). Even the idea of God appearing as a small boy is a neat riff, but it’s never more than set dressing when it could have been the defining element of the film (similar to how Noah replaced God for a more sci-fi being called The Creator).
The most interesting subtext in the film is a broader allusion to the history of the Jewish people. In one scene, assassinated Hebrew slaves are burned en masse, while elsewhere slaves are forced to hide under their homes to evade Egyptian search parties. In these moments, it seems Scott is building an analogy to the Holocaust, and the film’s conclusion, gesturing toward nation-building, seems to weigh heavily on the side of the Israelis in the contemporary conflict over the Holy Land. A film more dedicated to this analogy would have been an amazing inflection of the story we all know so well, but three scenes in 150 minutes isn’t enough on which to hang a comprehensive interpretation.
Exodus: Gods and Kings isn’t a bad film (a tremendous improvement from the last Scott film I saw, the dismal Prometheus), but it is disappointing for how little it pushes the story beyond what we already know. For anyone who knows the story, even in its broadest strokes, the film won’t hold much suspense or even any emotion beyond a feeling of obligation as events proceed unremarkably. For all the technical skill at work in rendering lifelike plague sequences, what’s missing is a sense of spectacle, something we saw quite successfully in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Despite the dated Technicolor and the mild doses of camp, DeMille’s original epic had a scope and a pervading attitude of wonder that Exodus is sadly lacking. Exodus isn’t a big-budget remake of The Ten Commandments, just a more precise, condensed, and slightly better-acted version of the same story without the grandeur the narrative demands.
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