Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

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.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is rated PG-13 for “violence including battle sequences and intense images.”  The standard bevy of plagues is seen here, with boils and insects being particularly grotesque; some combat scenes feature violence without any blood.

Noah (2014)

Abandon all hope, ye who anticipate a Biblically accurate adaptation of the flood narrative.  This here’s Aronofsky territory.  The same uber-metaphorical lens through which Black Swan regards Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” gets applied here to Genesis, resulting in a film that is often uncannily strange but never less than engaging.

Russell Crowe stars as the Scriptural patriarch who gathers his family and two-of-every-kind in a colossal ark after a vision from The Creator informs him that the world is about to perish in a flood.  As he gathers his family (wife Jennifer Connelly, sons including Logan Lerman, and daughter-in-law Emma Watson), Noah incurs the wrath of local warlord Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), who refuses to believe that God has not spoken to him too.  Postscript – check out Anthony Hopkins as a berry-gathering Methuselah, doing that wise old man act he’s perfected by now.

Let’s set aside the religious debate right off the bat.  The film doesn’t purport Biblical accuracy; in fact, director Darren Aronofsky disavows any such intention.  Consequently, I think Noah ought to be measured by the same standards as any other film adaptation of a major mythic narrative, in the vein of superhero or Hercules movies.  And there’s nothing in Noah that constitutes an unequivocal betrayal of the source material, nothing incompatible with the core of the original story.

As an interpretive adaptation, then, Noah is mostly successful, though it borders every so often on the bizarre.  The film is fortunately anchored by a very compelling and very human performance from Crowe, who imbues Noah with a deeper humanity than most interpretations. Rather than present Noah as a stoic “true believer,” Crowe gives him his moments of doubt, his misinterpretations of the message, and his post-flood uncertainty.  (Plus, after this and Man of Steel, Crowe has the market cornered on “dads who put their sons in arks.”)

Aronofsky does some visually clever stuff when he introduces Noah’s visions from The Creator as slideshow dream sequences, working in a nifty sample of the overlap between creationism and evolution.  But then the film gets really weird, and by weird I mean “rock people help build the ark.”  There’s a bit of murky theology in these rock people being fallen angels who help mankind, and their bids for forgiveness play up a side of Old Testament God that isn’t seen too often.  In a movie that otherwise immerses you in a specific time period in antiquity, though, living rocks strain credulity.

The other major subplot Aronofsky introduces is the presence of a tribal chief who goes to war for a spot on the ark.  It’s a plausible addition that Noah’s neighbors might have been a bit jealous, and Winstone is wholly engaging as Noah’s foil.  Aronofsky uses these villains, though, to posit an underlying vegans-versus-carnivores message that ultimately confounds more than it proselytizes.  (Some are reading it as anti-industrialist, though that may be a bridge too far.)  It’s fine for establishing a contrast between Noah and the sinners, but it raises major ethical questions:  Noah kills three hunters to avenge their killing of an animal for food, but he turns a blind eye to the rape and pillage of actual humans next door.  I see what Aronofsky is doing, adding an earthy and spiritual element to Noah’s communion with The Creator, but it’s more distracting than it should be precisely because the logic doesn’t hold up.

All told, though, Noah ends up an engaging film, a successful spectacle – which is, at the end of the day, all I ask of a movie.  It’s far from patently offensive, and the parts in the film that work do work very well.  Aside from a few silly bits, Noah is big-budget pageantry at its most watchable, put forward by a powerful lead performance and directed by a man with an unmistakable (if punctuated by logical error) directorial vision.

Noah is rated PG-13 for “violence, disturbing images and brief suggestive content.”  Aside from the whole exterminating flood, there are a few scenes of bloody combat, other scenes of animals being killed in gory fashion, and a bit of bare-shouldered friskiness from the cast’s younger group.

Next week, something we haven’t done in a very long while – two reviews on the same day. Hint:  what’s the big release this Friday?  And when is the Double-Oh-Seventh of this month?  Put another way, when is an American icon like a British agent?  When they’re both reviewed here, that is!  See you next week!