Exodus: Gods and Kings Review

Ridley Scott can still raise an army and a city, and the plagues carry one good idea: the disasters cascade as natural consequence, crocodiles churning the Nile red, then the frogs, then the flies, then the boils. Very little else functions. Bale plays Moses as a competent general annoyed by God, a defensible reading, but the film cannot decide whether he is a reluctant prophet or a guerrilla commander and it abandons the insurgency thread halfway through without comment. Joel Edgerton, buried in bronzer and eyeliner as Ramesses, is asked to carry scenes nobody bothered to write.

Casting white British and Australian actors as Egyptians and Hebrews while African and Middle Eastern performers fill the servant roles was indefensible then and reads worse now. Dariusz Wolski shoots handsome wide vistas and murk everywhere else, which the post converted 3D pass drains further. The Red Sea becomes a receding tide rather than standing walls, a rational choice rendered as brown surf. God arrives as a petulant English child, an idea far more interesting to describe than to sit through for two and a half hours.