Dearest Blog, end of the year means burning that unused vacation, so today I found myself at a mid-afternoon screening of Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Spoiler level here will be mild, nothing you wouldn't know from the trailers.
Believing he's been called by God, Moses leads hundreds of thousands of Hebrew slaves out of Egypt.
Dear reader(s), in the interest of full and fair disclosure I'll note that to me the Bible is as real as a Twilight novel. I mean that not to insult anyone's beliefs, but to make it clear that Biblical accuracy or lack thereof is not why I hated this movie. I hated it because, to quote one of my all-time favorite reviews, it is "a lumbering bore."
Much has been made of all the white folks portraying characters who would have been decidedly un-white, and that does make it a bit hard to take the movie seriously. Sigourney Weaver as an Egyptian queen gave me a fit of the giggles that I almost didn't get past, and I'm pretty sure a servant girl was wearing one of Lady Gaga's wigs. Close-ups reveal French manicures on some of the women. (I'm not even kidding.) Accents are all over the place--hell, Christian Bale runs through four or five different ones himself--and the language is too modern to suit the movie's time frame. If Lord of the Rings bought its battle scenes at Wal-Mart, they'd probably look a lot like the ones in Exodus. Much of the CGI is laughably bad; in fact, the whole thing kinda looks like a regional theatre production of Jesus Christ Superstar. And if being bored to tears isn't bad enough, there's a boatload of explicit animal cruelty for your viewing pleasure, and a blustery score that occasionally goes all "NCIS terrorist cue." It's more than a little offensive.
Bale's Moses is an unsympathetic character, who, like Russell Crowe's Noah, comes off as cold-hearted screwball rather than a man agonizing over choices he must make for the greater good. Moses' "brother" turned nemesis Ramses, played by a barely recognizable Joel Edgerton, is a buffoon in enough guyliner for a Motley Crue video. Ben Mendelsohn turning up was a pleasant surprise, but that's about the only good thing I have to say about Exodus.
Exodus: Gods and Kings clocks in at a bloated 150 minutes and is rated PG13 for "violence including battle scenes and intense images."
Of a possible nine Weasleys, Exodus: Gods and Kings gets two. It's a trainwreck.
Until next time...
I am, in fact, too fast for love.
