{"id":29107,"date":"2014-12-09T00:04:12","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T05:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29107"},"modified":"2014-12-08T07:05:36","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T12:05:36","slug":"exodus-gods-and-kings-gets-panned-by-forbes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/12\/09\/exodus-gods-and-kings-gets-panned-by-forbes\/","title":{"rendered":"Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/em> gets panned by Forbes<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Mendelson<\/a> reviews the soon-to-open movie by Ridley Scott, and finds it awful:<\/p>\n

Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/em> is a terrible film. It is a badly acted and badly written melodrama that takes what should be a passionate and emotionally wrenching story and drains it of all life and all dramatic interest. It hits all the major points, like checking off boxes on a list, yet tells its tale at an arms-length reserve with paper-thin characters. It is arguably a film intended for adults, with violence that makes a mockery of its PG-13 rating, yet it has far less nuance, emotional impact, and moral shading than DreamWorks Animation\u2019s PG-rated and seemingly kid-targeted The Prince of Egypt<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The film starts with an arbitrary mass battle scene, one which serves no purpose save for having a mass battle sequence to toss into the trailers. The primary alteration to the story is the inclusion of said gratuitous action beats. The film is relentlessly grim yet oddly unemotional, which is a tricky balance to accidentally pull off. The actors (who have all done excellent work elsewhere) are all oddly miscast, and that\u2019s not even getting to the whole \u201creally white actors playing Egyptians\u201d thing. Oh right, that little issue\u2026 It\u2019s actually worse than you\u2019ve heard.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, it may have been better to just make a 100% white cast similar to Noah<\/em>. This film instead is filled with minorities in subservient roles, be it slaves, servants, or (implied) palace sex toys. Instead of merely having a film filled with only white actors, what the film does is implicitly impose a racially-based class system, where the white characters are prestigious and\/or important while the various minorities are inherently second or third-class citizens almost by virtue of their skin color. I am sure this was unintentional, but that\u2019s the visual picture that Exodus<\/em> paints.<\/p>\n

Now to be absolutely fair, even if Exodus was cast with 100% racial\/ethnic authenticity, it would still be a pretty bad motion picture. The screenplay has our poor, miscast actors speaking in various accents and in a bizarre hybrid of \u201cancient times period piece\u201d English and more modern American English, which leads to lines like \u201cFrom an economic standpoint alone, what you\u2019re asking is problematic,\u201d which is Rameses\u2019s (Joel Edgerton) response to Moses\u2019s initial plea to \u201cLet my people go!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Mendelson reviews the soon-to-open movie by Ridley Scott, and finds it awful: Exodus: Gods and Kings is a terrible film. It is a badly acted and badly written melodrama that takes what should be a passionate and emotionally wrenching story and drains it of all life and all dramatic interest. It hits all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,370,11],"tags":[86,588,122,99],"class_list":["post-29107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-middle-east","category-religion","tag-criticism","tag-egypt","tag-movies","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7zt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29108,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29107\/revisions\/29108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}