Review of Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) by Jeffery C — 04 Mar 2015

Exodus: Gods and Kings is the latest adaptation of the story of Moses and his feud against the pharaoh Ramses to set free hundreds of thousands of slaves. The events explored in this film are ones that many would be familiar with, especially those who are religious, and seeing some of these events on screen made for the most memorable scenes of the movie. These historical events such as Moses' interactions with God (which I thought were done in a very interesting way), the parting of the Red Sea (also done with a different approach), and the 10 commandments were the movies attempt to stay as accurate and relevant even though some of these events were featured more heavily than others and some not at all. So from a historical standpoint I did like parts of this film. But these moments, the more significant ones, were spaced out very far apart and a lot of the in-between sections weren't all that interesting, it felt like at times the movie was just unnecessarily dragging on. The 2.5 hour runtime was definitely way too long, having this film sit at just under 2 hours, at 1 hour 50 minutes would have made it much better. It wasn't fault of the performances that made it very uninteresting, just that there was not enough going on to spend so much time at each of the two camps.

In terms of the performances, I thought that Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton did pretty fine jobs, nothing too spectacular. But the inclusion of a mostly white cast as these historically non-white characters initially threw me off a little and was pretty noticeable but as the film went on I gradually became used to it and didn't end up hurting the film too much. Visually this film was epic, the scale of the cities that they built through CGI was stunning and even the minor special effects went unnoticeable. Also the battles I thought were relatively entertaining, it was too bad that there wasn't a whole lot of it, the film could have benefited from that. I must say I was a little underwhelmed by the final confrontation between Ramses and Moses, there was not a whole lot of build up prior to it but I still expected a little more than what I got. In the end Ridley Scott's epic retelling of the story of Moses some right historically, visually and in terms of the plot, but the way too long runtime and lack of interesting content brings this film down, nowhere near one of Ridley's best. - 6.5.