Gods of Egypt

Fantasy is very difficult to get right in films. Audience resistance is quite high, especially when it involves characters with difficult-to-remember names or diverse place names. Relating to a fantasy world of beasts and magic is often tricky for audiences who may prefer grounded, realistic drama. There are exceptions though – the worlds of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings captured public imaginations and the complex mass of stories and themes in Game of Thrones also attracted an audience. This fear of fantasy seems to have informed a slightly tentative approach in the writing and direction of Gods of Egypt. There are plenty of fantastic creatures present ranging from giant, vicious snake like creatures to Minotaurs in all but name, and an array of Egyptian gods. However, there has been avoidance of any of the cod Shakespearean dialogue that often permeates works of this type and an emphasis more upon realistic dialogue. This creates a needless tension between the intensity of the innovative visuals and the prosaic words dropping from the actors, a tension that is never resolved as the linear story progresses forwards but never upwards. The pleasures with this film arise mostly from the intensity of the visual experience. Every environment has been precisely designed, full of colour and dimension, looking very different from the landscapes seen in past films based on myth and history. The benefit of this is that there is always something to attract the eye, from great sky barges to rainbow lit waterfalls and massive monuments. Like all Alex Proyas’ films the visual ideas add weight and substance that the scripting sometimes fails to. It is however that narrative which brings the film down with a series of very deliberate events extrapolated in excessive detail, burdened by actors who at times look deathly uncomfortable in their roles. Only Geoffrey Rush, in a small but notable part, really excels with so many of the others not able to bring life to the dialogue as they intone in front of ever present green screens. In the end it is a pity that such a wonderfully conceived world at the visual level could not have been combined with a compelling story and acting.

When the credits rolled after having watched this movie with my kids I was perplexed. I knew this movie had not received very great ratings and I had heard rumors that some people had even labelled it the worst movie of the year. However, I had liked watching the movie…a lot! Sure, the script is predictable and certainly wont win any prices for best script anywhere. The acting is adequate but no more. But it is a fun fantasy adventure movie, a simple adventure / action fantasy roller-coaster. Plenty of fairly cool special effects. Some humor, some romance. It is also fairly devoid of politically correct preaching, whining, mentally unstable and self destructive “heroes” and all that crap. In short it is the kind of movie I like. I actually looked up the movies page on Wikipedia and it was pretty much full of nonsense and whining about how the movie was not “ethnically correct”. What the f…? It is a bloody fantasy adventure movie for Christ sake! It is meant to entertain! Who the hell cares about whether the actors are native Egyptians or something else? Well, I guess Eskimos would look a bit funny in those roles but otherwise… Yes it does take quite a few liberties with Egyptian mythology but again, it is a fantasy movie guys! And Egyptian mythology, like any other mythology, goods etc, is nothing but fantasy and story telling from the start so just live with it. To me they stayed true enough to the core of the mythology and I would actually give the director and script writers bonus points for actually depicting the earth as flat as was the predominant belief in those times. Those scenes with Ra dragging the sun and the flat Earth was quite beautiful actually. The rating on IMDb is also on the low side but of those that took the effort to write a review most seems to be quite positive. The mostly negative ones are, of course, the so called “critics”. No surprise there. It is sad to see how a, in my opinion a quite entertaining, movie can be so sabotaged by a bunch of, again in my opinion, loud mouthed, ignorant, intolerant, fanatical SJWs who seems to believe that a movie cannot be allowed to just entertain but has to carry a political message, their political message. I would recommend anyone into fantasy and adventure movies to check this one out if you should stumble upon it. I certainly do not regret adding it to my collection.

GenerationofSwine

1/10

1/12/2023

I usually go for movies like this but.... whatever happened to practical effects? You lose me with too much blatant CGI. This movie, it seemed like it was only CGI. And not just CGI, but the kind of CGI that looks like a video game. It honestly lost me right away, I gave it about ten minutes and just stopped.