Upon seeing those lines, I remember thinking, there’s your story! The great majority of that 137-minute film included countless scenes reflecting Zamperini’s WWII suffering.
#MOSES THE MOVIE MOVIE#
The film’s vision of a vengeful, mercurial boy-God is unsettling, and “Exodus” does step cautiously out onto the limb of religious doubt when Ramses asks Moses, following the death of his son, “Is this your God - killer of children?” But that’s as far as the film’s nerve goes and it quickly retreats into the faith Scott knows best, that of the muscular movie magic that has sustained his career for four decades.In those two lines we were told of Zamperini’s forgiveness, including for the particularly barbaric camp commander. Nor does it help that Bale lacks his usual mad gleam as Moses (perhaps he lent it to Russell Crowe for “Noah”).
The parting of the Red Sea is the same: impressively rendered but visually cold CGI eye-candy for an audience that has been over-stimulated once too often. How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen “Iron Man 3”? These scenes and the one-two punch that caps them - the curtain of darkness that falls across the land and the mass crib death of the first-born - are about as awe-inspiring as all the other epics of mass destruction that fill our multiplexes by the dozen, which is to say sort of but not very. You want plagues? “Exodus” has plagues: frogs, flies, boils, hail, cows collapsing in bloody heaps, locusts creating riots in the granaries, and - just because the movie can - giant crocodiles that chew Egyptian fishermen into toothpicks. “Exodus” all too briefly strikes a note of humor when Moses demands the slaves be allowed to return to Canaan and Ramses muses, “From an economic standpoint. A war of attrition ensues with very faint parallels to the regional uprisings and civil wars of today this isn’t an Arab Spring but a Hebrew Indian Summer. Now comes the main event: Moses’ return to Memphis and the underground Israelite resistance led by the aged Nun (Ben Kingsley, also given not enough to do), Joshua (Aaron Paul), and the hero’s brother Aaron (Andrew Tarbet). The Yahweh who subsequently appears is a testy British boy (Isaac Andrews), named Malak in the film’s credits but answering to the traditional “I AM,” and his motives, appropriately, remain unclear. They don’t get much of a spotlight in this telling, although Weaver gets to spit a little venom.Įxiled after his true parentage is revealed, Moses wanders in the wilderness, settles down with Zipporah, and is given a Godly vision after being conked in the head during a rock-fall - this being the movie’s wan attempt at psychological realism. Lurking in the background are fine actors like Sigourney Weaver as Ramses’ mother, Hiam Abbass as Moses’ adoptive mother, Bithiah, and Golshifteh Farahani as the new Pharaoh’s bride. After the latter’s death, the throne passes to his son and Moses’s best chum Ramses, played by Joel Edgerton as a lacrosse bro who has just been promoted to chief executive. “Exodus” skips the bit with the bulrushes and picks up with the grown Moses (Bale) installed as the adopted son and canniest adviser to the aging Seti (John Turturro, keeping his eccentric light under a bushel). Still, even Scott seems a little glum about the task he has been handed. But verisimilitude is asking too much of a studio blockbuster - forget it, Jake, it’s Hollywood. The genre has always favored modern standards of beauty over grimy historical accuracy, not to mention casting actors of European heritage in Middle Eastern roles, a practice which has caused some protests this time out. Who knew that the average goatherd in 1,300 BCE had huts designed by Pottery Barn? Or that Moses’ wife, Zipporah (María Valverde) has the straightest, whitest teeth this side of the Sinai. By contrast, Scott’s “Exodus” is dutiful, deeply earnest, and more than a little dull.Īnd clean. Robinson as Dathan! Yvonne de Carlo as Sephora!), gaudy displays of Pharaoh-nic opulence, and huckster sermonizing. Every “Exodus” is retold for its current generation, but the one DeMille told our grandparents still has a tent-show fervor, with its nutty Hollywood cast (Edward G. It’s a good, solid multiplex barnstormer, and all that’s missing is the juice and the pulp of a story that’s been around 3,000 years for a reason.
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