Exodus: Gods and Kings

[MacGuffin]

Release date: December 12, 2014

Starring: Aaron Paul, Christian Bale, Sigourney Weaver, Joel Edgerton, Indira Varma, Ben Kingsley, John Turturro

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Premise: An account of Moses' hand in leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt.

[03]

i like that aaron paul is getting a ridiculous amount of work.
that poster is absolutely retarded.
the trailer is cool looking, but i literally laughed when they put 'from the director of gladiator'.
he directed a lot of other cool movies but they decided to reference the one that this looks exactly like. i dont know.

[Lottery]

Edgerton reminds me of Ricky Gervais in that poster.

[MacGuffin]

[picolas]

this is 150 minutes long and i was rarely bored (except during a half hour stretch when moses disappears for no reason, and ramses is too flat a character to sustain interest). it features dozens of incredible images that surely cost bazillions of dollars each. there is no visual compromise. it really looks like god is making stuff happen. but what does it all amount to? this is exactly the moses story i was expecting, told with a superficial vigour and zero surprises. why make this now? why does it exist? i really couldn't tell you.

i was confused by moses' relationship with the plagues. they seem to happen regardless of what he's doing. what are the rules? his relationship with god is poorly conveyed. the whole plague/miracles thing, while incredible to look at, is kind of a crappy narrative device in general. it's a deus ex machina, not just at the end, but throughout the whole narrative. that's why the story of moses has to be more about characters than events. this movie doesn't really have any characters. moses comes close. everyone else is more of a look or an attitude in fancy clothes. ramses is stern, aaron paul is skeptical, ben kingsley is.. ben kingslike...

christian bale and his wife have an unexpectedly hilarious chemistry. here's an excerpt from when moses is recovering from an injury and his wife is tending to him:

moses: "i haven't been completely honest with you."
wife: "about what?"
moses: "about who i am, and where i've come from, and what i've done. [so basically everything.]"
wife: "have you lied about your feelings for me?"
moses: "no. i've been honest about that." *passes out*

i'm barely paraphrasing this scene. HUGE laughs in the theatre.

[diggler]

Spoilers:

There were a lot of unintentional laughs in this. When Moses started crossing the Red Sea before it was fully parted someone in my screening yelled out "JUST WAIT A MINUTE!" Aaron Paul looking confused while watching Moses talk to himself got some chuckles too. There was no point in having him see Moses do that because there are no narrative consequences for it. In fact, the entire film is made up of no narrative consequences. Moses is exiled instead of killed, winds up in a garden paradise where no one asks any questions at all (I think the land owner asks two or three questions, which Moses doesn't answer, then disappears from the film entirely). When the wave starts coming back, Moses sends everyone to shore, then.... stands there? Then he and Ramses both survive the wave anyway. Picolas called it when he said deus ex machina because literally nothing anyone does in this movie is of any consequence. Moses isn't even necessary in his own story.

It's very pretty to look at, especially the scenes in Pithom. That's about it.

[polkablues]

Joel Edgerton in this movie looks like someone drew eyebrows on a grumpy baby.