Exodus: Gods and Kings

God? Damn this movie, please.

Going to skip this introduction. There have been too many movies and re-tellings of this story. It is thousands of years old. Get some small history knowledge and you will know the basic premise..... Not good enough? Fine. Moses was an adopted prince of Egypt. He gets found out as a Hebrew, and sentenced to exile. While in exile he happens upon a small community of Hebrews where he finds his wife. His peace is interrupted so he can go and free the Hebrews from slavery. Plagues happen, parting of an ocean, SPOILER WARNING the Hebrews are free and start a new journey. Done and done.

It is hard to fail on as many levels as this movie did. I mean, I have never seen a movie fail on so many levels in my life time. Legitimately, a have a hard time believing anyone walked out of this movie, fully satiated. Are you religious? Did you come to this movie for a religious experience? To bad. You like action? Did the previews give you some notion that there was going to be action in this? Whoops, sorry. Go see another movie. Do you like amazing visual effects? Were you expecting to see what the technology of today had to offer us, when it came time for the sea to part? You are better off watching Prince of Egypt. Do you like it when people white wash history with quite possibly the most Caucasian people in Hollywood playing the roles of Hebrews and Egyptians?  GOOD NEWS!

On a more serious note, let us delve into this movie's story. It is all pretty basic for a Moses story... oh wait, well at least parts of it were. There was a small hiccup along the way of making this movie, and I am not going to be talking about the biblical inaccuracies. Mainly because I loved Noah so biblical inaccuracies don't really concern me. At first they were trying to make it seem like Moses was crazy, then he slowly became more and more sane. He still talked to a small, invisible child, claiming it was God speaking to him; but, no one really questioned that after a while. After some time passed they had a small concern come up about Moses' sanity, then it got stifled by a speech that I assume was supposed to be motivational. There was no believable hard choices in this. Moses made a fuss or something about "hating to see the people that raised him undergo such turmoil" or something to that effect; but, it seemed like they just fit that in, out of some undo obligation, or ignorance. I say ignorance because the scene just seemed to come out of no where. Like someone told the director "Umm, Moses is supposed to feel bad about hurting these people.," the the director smacked his head and added a line. Oh don't worry, there is so much more to take issue with when it comes to the story here, but in the interest of time let's move on to the audio.

 For those of you who frequent my blog, you will take note that I usually don't comment on the audio or visual of a movie, unless it blows me away or leaves me cringing. This case is an example of the later. Why is it that most religious movies feel that they have to make this movie seem older by adding a shit ton of wood instruments? Do they think the building of pyramids, and choices in fashion were to subtle? The music in this is not only cliche, but cliche in awful way. Cliche in the sense that you feel they had to pay Disney to use tracks from their movies made in the sixties. Music wasn't the only problem here, dialogue was all but impossible to hear sometimes. At first I thought I should just blame the lead actors for mumbling, then I realized I had to strain to hear anything coming from any of the actors unless they were yelling. When you can't even get the audio in your movie right, we have some major issues.

Audio now leads us to visual. In today's day and age, this company should feel embarrassed that they released something so visually unappealing. Some of the shots were well done, but it was mainly thanks to the scenery. The real fault here lies with the effects. Noticeably fake alligators, noticeably fake wall of water, noticeably fake plagues, and the CGI wasn't the worst part here, that honor lies with the make up. How do we make boils and plague look like shit? Ask whoever was in charge of the make up department here. Blood that looked like paint, boils that you could see were peeling off in some areas, and the worst ageing effect ever done in film's history (that includes J. Edgar). When I said this movie failed on every level I wasn't exaggerating. This movie fails on every perceivable level.

Finally we come to the acting. Surely, having a cast filled with A list actors this movie won't suck in the acting department, right? Wrong. Did the director forget that his job is to rein in these primadonnas? Christian Bale was all over the place, but he has a tendency to be hit or miss in any movie. Joel Edgerton surprised the hell out of me, by overacting worse than William Shatner trying to escape an alien planet. The only person that could even hope to give Joel a run for his money was John Turturro. Sigourney Weaver seems to have one mode these days, and that is to act like Sigourney Weaver. My condolences lie with Aaron Paul, and Ben Kingsley in this production. This is the second movie Aaron Paul was in that I didn't like, and I just want to see him do well for some reason. Ben Kingsley should have known better than to sign on for this garbage.

Now before you start saying that I had something against this movie right out of the gate, let me just say that I really wanted this movie to succeed. I was riding high on the release of Noah this year, and I was just about to start giving every religious movie a shot. When the movie was about half way through its run time a woman got up and walked out screaming religious sacrament to the audience that remained as she left, with her friend screaming "AMEN!" behind her. So I wanted this movie to shut them up by turning around and being good. After all of that, here I sit. Disappointed and angry. Don't make the same mistake.

Final Verdict: Don't do it If you have any respect for the film industry, teach these people a lesson by not acknowledging their movie's existence. More to the point, save yourself the time, money and energy.