Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, Ben Kingsley, Issac Andrews, Maria Valverde, John Turturro, Ben Mendelsohn, Sigourney Weaver
Off the back of the classics Alien and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott has cemented his place in the twenty first century with the hits Black Hawk Down, American Gangster and Prometheus. However, his 2013 crime thriller The Counsellor flopped dramatically. Exodus: Gods and Kings may be the film to revive the epic.
Born a Jew but raised amongst the kings of Egypt, Moses (Bale) is respected and befriended by the Prince Ramesses (Edgerton). Upon King Seti’s (Turturro) death Ramesses’ tyrannical reign begins and God recruits Moses to free his people and take them to their promised land.
What Scott applies in brilliant abundance an level of epic unachieved in his previous work. The direction is consistently grand, bold, stylish and thrilling. This effect reaches its peak in the brutality of the battles and the horrific element of Egypt’s plagues and has a technical scale to rival or even succeed Interstellar or The Lord of the Rings.
Still however stunning the filmmaking is, the film is never especially thoughtful: character development is at a standstill; the female roles are far under-attended. Even the spiritual elements are fairly broadly handled. The ever amazing Christian Bale’s performance tends to disappointingly devolve into generic Heston-esque bellows and grunts. The likes of Edgerton (Warrior), Paul (Breaking Bad), Kingsley (Gandhi) and Weaver (Alien) elevate this from the procedural action even if they never get the chance to actually flex their dramatic muscles.
Exodus is best when it is at its biggest and most brash but is a letdown in the smaller, more personal scenes. Still, Scott’s uncanny ability for the visually sublime and the large, if underused, ensemble combine for a spectacular and truly modern epic. As the monumental event it promised to be, it underachieves.
7/10
“Remember this. I am prepared to fight. For eternity.”
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