A Biblical Wash

If you’re going to rewrite an ancient myth, you’d better hire a poet. 

There is no poetry — visual or verbal — in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), a weirdly bland and boring remake sunk by piffling computer graphics and a script that is obviously one of those compromise-by-committee jobs without a personal voice (the kind that goes through endless rewrites by a variety of confused lackeys). I’m reminded of an old quote, variously attributed to Dr. Johnson, Lessing, Sheridan, and Daniel Webster: 

“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

The only idea in the script that inspires awe or dread is a Yahweh that shows himself to Moses (Christian Bale) as an East London street urchin with a demanding attitude. That conceit makes those few scenes with Moses and his God both chilling and comic, but the idea seems lifted from Harold Bloom’s interpretive conception of Yahweh as a temperamental, egotistic youngster who drags His chosen people into a covenant in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine and the earlier The Book of J. Bloom imagines Yahweh as a child who almost doesn’t know and doesn’t bother controlling His own strength. The young actor Isaac Andrews is perfect in the part; he owns it. When Moses speaks up to complain, Andrews cuts him off mid-sentence. There’s a seething resentment in the young boy’s eyes as he looks away from and then squarely at Moses before telling His servant-prophet what to do.

The screenplay is far weaker than the 1955 version by Cecil B. DeMille as a coherent narrative. It lacks the earlier version’s campy, stentorian dialogue — but there was poetry in that screenplay. In Gods and Kings, the script can’t even transition smoothly or keep track of who’s who. After two hours of this tedium, I still had no idea who Ben Kingsley was supposed to be. I knew he was an Israelite, but which one — Joshua? Moses’s father? Aaron? Which Egyptian princess in the earlier scenes was Moses’s adopted mother? Sigourney Weaver? Hiam Abbass? The Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani? I couldn’t remember a single quotable line of dialogue, either. Whose boneheaded idea was it to not give any of these mythic characters a memorably juicy line?

The rest of the picture is mundane and supremely tedious. Ridley Scott has no feel for this material. The computer graphics don’t stun or raise hairs on the back of the neck — they raise doubts about verisimilitude, as for example when locusts swarm toward Memphis at what appears to be jet aircraft speed. The film’s color palette is a sickly gun-metal green. The parting of the Red Sea was preposterous the way it was conceived: enormous tsunamis, tornadoes, and chariots moving across wet sand at cartoon speed symbolize nothing so much as the law of diminishing returns with today’s technology. DeMille’s Eisenhower-era version — with all its arresting squareness — is filled with color and storytelling power behind the special effects. Kids used to fight with their parents to be allowed to stay up long enough to watch the whole four-hour movie (lovingly parodied in a scene with Roy’s family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), which has corniness and pageantry and, finally, majesty, like the scene of a defeated Rameses and Nefretiri in funereal robes, hissing at each other like the Macbeths over their dead son and the ignominious defeat of their empire. Young viewers at home would never bother nagging their parents to stay up late to see anything this dismal.