People seem determined to compare this film with others, so I guess I'll start by sharing my own thoughts on that front. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) is the obvious comparison point, but I'm not sure there is any comparison. Each fails in its own way, and each succeeds in others. One was made with enormous scope and became a classic largely because of elements that are not pure artwork, and the other wants desperately to repeat this and fails largely due to bad writing, heavy effects, and bad direction. In short, one is a dramatic masterpiece, and the other a dramatic black hole. Ridley Scott's own success story, Gladiator (2000), also comes to mind because it felt not unlike Ten Commandments when it came out. Russell Crowe channeled Charlton Heston as the heroic man who, unsurprisingly, becomes a hero. But where Gladiator rocked with its focus on an actor's strong performance, Exodus falters by largely ignoring anyone's acting. Finally, Exodus just isn't as much fun as this year's other biblical attempt-at-an-epic, Noah; at least Darren Aronofsky knew to put his tongue in his cheek when he had giant rock monsters help Russell Crowe do Big Important Things.
Now let's focus on this picture, and explore my claims. Moses, played by a stoic Christian Bale, is so underwritten and underperformed that I never felt a twinge of sympathy for him. He's a hardheaded man who likes to flex his muscles and look grumpy. God in the film is portrayed by a little boy (actually I think the boy was an angel, not God himself), which I kind of liked at first. But then he starts popping up at odd times, which is obnoxious, and nobody else can see him, which makes Moses look crazy at times: It is an inspired choice for the character I really liked, but both Scott and Bale ignore its implications. As a boy, God (or whoever he is) is a match for Christian Bale in grumpiness and angst. I suppose that works well enough with the God of the Old Testament (he's a jerk, let's face it; he only cares about one people group at the expense of countless others, and he pushes people to do impossible things and then punishes them for failing), but it feels funky and contrived in this film. Joel Edgerton plays Ramesses with possibly the only good performance in the movie; his character is complex, and he performs with both nuance and strength as the primary villain, and won my sympathies which is probably not Scott's intent. The rest of the cast is largely irrelevant. John Turturro shows some notable acting strength as the Pharaoh, but he dies before long. Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Paul, and Ben Kingsley pop in for a few scenes, but are largely ignored for some tragic reason.
Large sets (both digital and practical) and beautiful, extravagant costumes steal the film. Unfortunately, the characters that inhabit this world have no development and almost no drama, and so the stunning visuals lose almost all of their significance. The dialogue is poor, and the script's pacing is severely uneven. And though there are moments of great special visual effects, they are empty because we don't care about anyone in the shots. I had more sympathy for the masses being tortured by the plagues than for Moses himself. Scott seems to have forgotten that an epic is not made simply by huge visual scope, even with heavily graded picture.
No, this movie does not stick strictly to the biblical narrative, so let's just nip that in the bud. It's an adaptation, people -- we've had this discussion before. But as its own narrative, Exodus doesn't work well. Poor dialogue and severely uneven pacing reveal a weak script that wanted to be an epic; it's one thing to criticize a film for its problems, but when you gauge its failure of reaching its own aspirations, the whole thing quickly becomes pitiful. The beginning starts with an attempted bang, but since the details of the battle are left ambiguous at best, all we can take away from it is an idea that the Egyptians are fierce in battle. And the buildup to Moses's mountaintop revelation is woefully unclear; one scene has him denying his Hebrew blood, and literally the next scene has him hugging his mother and sister before walking away in exile. Even having read the story for most of my life, I wasn't sure what was happening before my eyes. It's just sloppy filmmaking. And then the ending sort of fizzles out into a downright silly post-climax couple of minutes. Instead of attending to the now-free nation of Israelites, we see Moses carving the Ten Commandments above a vague shot of a golden calf, none of which is explained. Then we see him return to his wife, talking about how much he loves her. What a waste of cinema.
That said, there are exceptional high points in the movie. Honestly, the lengthy sequence in the middle of the film when plagues assault Egypt is one of the most engaging bits of film I've seen this year. Exciting and enormous, the plagues are shown with a kinetic energy not unlike that in those huge domino art experiments. Scott shows them not necessarily with scientific accuracy (if there is any), but he does seem to play with the idea that if these horrific events were to take place, this might be what they'd look like. The plagues are no less miraculous, as some have claimed, as a result of this, but they do make more sense in the realm of reality. The crocodile attack (which results in the Nile running red with blood) is just wonderful, too, but maybe I love those beasties too much. Similarly, the parting of the Red Sea is a really beautiful scene, and it feels more grounded and realistic than any other version of the story I've seen (remember the walls of water in The Prince of Egypt, with the silhouettes of fish looming over the Israelites? That happened.).
A final thought. People like to talk about whitewashing because it makes them feel smart and edgy. But I do think that here it has some merit, not just because the characters are whiter than chalk under their heavy makeup, but because their accents are all over the place. We have generic British, attempted generic British, Bale's American with occasional generic Britishisms, and vague attempts at a vague ethnic accent that could be just about anything. Not acceptable, Scott. When we have had a mainstream film of Christ's death done entirely in authentic languages, there is no excuse for this kind of uninformed blundering.
IMDb: Exodus: Gods and Kings
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