Bulrushes is right. Bushels of bullshit, you’d need the wings of an angel to stay above it.
Christian Bale outplays Charlton Heston as Moses, who led his people into the Red.
Joel Edgerton plays Rameses in Yul Brynner mode, the nude nutted nabob of the Nile, a Pharoah force it, major.
And the revelation: Ben Mendelsohn channelling Frank Thring, those kohl eyes, that delivery. A superb characterisation in a part that’s bigger than the track through the Red Sea.
EXODUS: GODS & KINGS is a remake of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, one of which should have been, Ridley Scott shalt not re-tread Cecil b. Demille, or indeed, his own excessive successes, for many of the plot points assigned to Moses were allotted to Maximus Russellous in GLADIATOR.
Foundling and brilliant bluer, strategic shirtfronter of Hitite hordes, Moses is much more the man than Rameses. It’s plain to the eyes of the future Pharaoh’s father, John Turturro, and so there is a jealousy of the pampas displaced person by the pampered anointed.
After dad’s death, Moses is outed as a Hebrew, and the new pharaoh banishes the orphan from Memphis, eventually finding family and fulfilment in a village of goat herders.
Disregarding the village’s tradition of admonition to scaling a holy mountain, Moses suffers a fall and hits his head, waking to a burnish bush ventriloquised by a lippy kid who addresses him in arrogant attitude bother boy British.
Of course – God is a child, a juvenile with a chip on his shoulder – vengeful, wilful, and jealous, who directs Moses to return to Memphis and lead a revolt of Hebrew slaves and bring them back to Canaan.
Yeah, figures, this is the kid who turfed his only begotten son at the time, Adam, and the apple of his eye squeeze, Eve, out of paradise over a bit of fruit, and later demanded Abraham to butcher his own son in a tasteless test of fidelity.
So now this kid wrenches Moses from his family, makes him the messenger of threats against an entire people, and unleashes a pestilence that includes mass infanticide and famine. I see EXODUS: GODS & KINGS playing big in Gaza.
Milking human kindness dry via acts of blatant and brutal barbarism, Scott revels in the crocodile attacks, locust infestations, and festering, suppurating skin.
By the time mouldy Moses becomes God’s stenographer on Mount Sinai, one is gobsmacked at the God smacked hypocrisy of the two tablets sixth edict: THOU SHALT NOT MURDER.
It comes well down the list, and is obviously trumped by the first, you shall have no other Gods before me. A kind of carte blanche for every fanatical “freedom fighter” of faith.
EXODUS: GODS & KINGS? Gods and monsters, more like.