Exodus: Gods and Kings

Director of photography Tom Townend stated a few years ago that a natural consequence of today's trailers increasingly mimicking the three act structure of main stream films meant that every moment of the finished product played as rote. Ridley Scott's latest is an interesting case in point as, not taking the actual trailer into account, how can a film that is based on such well known source material (in this case the biblical tale of Moses) not come across as routine? In Scott's case his approach is to make the film as loose an interpretation as possible. Now based on Darron Aronofsky taking the same approach with the awful Noah, coupled with the fact the last film Sir Ridley directed was the dire The Counsellor, this doesn't bode well at all. However, Exodus is passable entertainment. It does have a problem when it comes to reviewing it though. Scott is an agnostic and has stated that means he was the perfect choice to direct such a tale. Really? Whatever your religious beliefs, surely if you're presenting one of the Old Testament's most iconic episodes you would want to make it as accurate to it's source material as possible? In addition, doesn't this also make Scott a massive hypocrite? He's not sure he believes (which is fair enough), but that doesn't seem to stop him trousering plenty of dosh for helming this production. Anyway, I digress and this argument is for another time and place. The best thing to do when watching Exodus is to put aside thoughts of historical accuracy and just enjoy this for what it is and no more. If you're not au fait with the story of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, we have Moses (Christian Bale) taking a stance against the Pharaoh Ramesses (Joel Edgerton) - death and destruction does follow. Scott's love (read - ridiculous overuse) of CGI has been a joke for years now and there's many scenes here that you could pretty much just cut and paste into some of his other "epics". That's not to say there isn't some great visual moments here (the ten deadly plagues are impressively realised), but any characterisation (despite Bale's best efforts) gets lost amongst the stop / start mayhem. Things aren't helped by some odd casting choices and costumes, with Ben Mendelsohn drawing the short straw here by being applied with so much make-up he looks like a camp oversized Oompa-Loompa. If you've got a spare two and half hours (gulp) there's just enough here to grab the attention, but it's been a long time since Scott made a really great film and it's clear his powers have been on the wane for quite a while now. Rating: 6/10.