Gods Of Egypt
The release of Gods of Egypt should put to rest the minor controversy that has dogged the film ever since it revealed its whitewashed cast right in the middle of a historic conversation on the importance of diversity in Hollywood: I can’t imagine anyone will regret not having their name attached to this feckless fantasy.
If we’re going to start with the problems, though, casting is fine enough: the gods here seem perfectly content to be epically hammy, but there’s no excusing our mortal surrogate Bek ( Brenton Thwaites), a member of the lost tribe of blonde Egyptians. More importantly, he is a thief who is out to help the god of blonde Egyptians, Horus ( Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), defeat the god of Scottish Egyptians, Set ( Gerard Butler) by stealing back the former’s eye. Most importantly, if Bek was any more of a blank space of charisma the only appropriate casting choice would be the Invisible Man.
In fairness to Thwaites he is not given a bounty of riches to go on. His opening narration caps off with the line “the one thing as powerful as any god: love” and the dialogue does not get appreciably more nimble from there. Possibly t his is because screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless treat their movie like the world’s most expensive Egyptian mythology study aid. Gods of Egypt is technically a retelling of the Osiris myth, which involves Set killing the king ( Osiris) and ruling Egypt in a particularly nasty way — here he is attempting to kill all the other gods and steal their powers while getting slaves to build monuments.
Osiris’s son, Horus, sets out to defeat Set and restore the balance back to Egypt, in this case with the help of Bek and that eye he took back. All of this is filled out with many other shoe- horned cosmological facts, usually accomplished by having one of the gods bellow them in the most portentous way you can bellow something. It feels like these proclamations should be followed by “and this WILL be on the quiz.”
Not that their attempts at having gods and mortals relate to each other are much better. Much of the movie involves Bek and Horus journeying across the desert in attempt to destroy the source of Set’s power, trading banter and barbs infused with all the wit of a customer service representative’s irate customer script. Their humour and bonding is essen- tially a series of one- liners that I don’t even think I could sensibly reference, because without tortured CGI set-ups, they would not even read as jokes.
“No, a CAT is a pet.” Does that do anything for you? Does it help if I explain that they are running from people riding snakes?
This doesn’t even get into the more vexing aesthetic CGI problems, most of which seem inexplicable in 2016. Some of it is just matters of taste, like the weird Captain Power/beast mode forms the gods take when they battle, while others are more basic, like chariot chases that look about as seamless as when they just used to put cars in front of screen backdrops and rolled tape on a winding road. All of Egypt, from the endless sand to the crumbling architecture to the vast digital crowds, looks weird and weightless, but I guess we knew even from the posters that partial fidelity was never the game plan here. Ω