Ridley Scott is, like Martin Scorsese and like many other directors of lesser fame, a great exponent of the worn-out cinema of image-movement that the thinker Gilles Deleuze unmasked and refuted in his film studies in the 1980s. In all his films, from “Alien” (1979) to this renewed adaptation of Exodus, there is a human being who, due to circumstances beyond their control, has to take up arms and defend themselves against someone or something that wants to destroy them; the final confrontation between two forces is their greatest achievement, with the inevitable result, according to the convention of Deus ex machina, of the triumph of the hero.
The best scenes of “Exodus: Gods and Kings” are those in which John Tuturro acts as the Pharaoh of Egypt and Ben Kingsley as the Jew who must convince, no longer Schlinder, but Moses-Batman, that he is the leader the oppressed people of Israel have been waiting for for years. The rest is a weak remake of the great movies of Cecil B. de Mille.
The cause of Scott’s failure is his lack of faith in what he does; the producers decided to finance a director who publicly boasts of being an atheist and who presents to us the 10 plagues of Egypt as a consequence of crocodiles that devoured half a dozen fishermen. Scott portrays Moses as a fearful person who does not present himself to the pharaoh during these plagues but uses them to send a calf with a message written on its back.
The “wise” Egyptian who presents the plagues as natural causes is the spokesman for the scientific arguments that Scott prefers to explain those divine punishments, but his efforts to attribute climate change to chance fail when said “wise” is pathetically hanged by the Pharaoh.
Christian Bale shows us that DC comic heroes like Batman do not even come close to biblical heroes, and much less to one of the greatest, Moses, who at 80 dared to challenge the most powerful monarch on earth with no argument other than his faith.
Bale is not only an atheist but also a fanatic of the atheist sect, those who tell children that Santa Claus or the divine child God do not exist; in a revealing scene, his Bedouin lover begs him not to tell her son that God is an invention of the human mind. Shortly after, Bale is the victim of a collapse that leaves him covered in mud up to his nose; a clear attempt by Scott not only to ignore but to profane the first demand that God made to Moses in Exodus: “Take off your sandals, for the ground you are standing on is holy.”
Bale revives the gestures and grunts of Batman in a fearful and irascible Moses who does not believe in God, not even after He manifests Himself not in a burning bush, which Scott leaves as a beautiful ornament of the set design, but in a spoiled child who lives obsessed with generals and wars.
Scott’s profanations against God don’t stop there; Bale raises his voice to God in several scenes and yells at Him as if He were just one among many gods. The same title already shows his irreverence; therefore, the viewer is not surprised when the spoiled brat who plays God does not tell Bale that He is the one who is.
Scott takes his skepticism to such an extreme that Bale loses consciousness before that child, and when Bale wakes up sick at home, he conjectures that it has all been a dream.
But both the capricious and petty idea of God as that of a Batman/Moses collapse when they are forced to faithfully represent the text of Exodus. The change occurs when Moses finally presents himself to the Pharaoh to announce the last plague, that of the death of the firstborn.
The change is too abrupt to be believable; his Batman/Moses does not even have the power that God grants to the biblical Moses to part the sea in two with his staff. Bale is a young soldier who arrives at the sea disoriented and when he sees the waters receding, he “feels” that they should march towards the bottom of the sea, a decision totally implausible according to the character arc that Scott himself has chosen to portray.
Once again, ignoring the scriptures, Scott’s Batman/Moses collapses again in his faith at the end when he decides to “sacrifice” himself to save the Pharaoh, waiting for him as the sea bed regains its waters; his humanity, like that of his archenemy, is swept away by the sea. Miraculously and by chance, Christian Bale withstands the pressure of three hundred meters of saltwater over his head, and with him, on the other shore, the Pharaoh also appears redeemed, undoubtedly in the hope of a sequel that we hope never happens.
The recent failure of “Napoleon” (2022) seems, according to Netflix’s advertising, to redeem itself with “Exodus: Gods and Kings”, but if the film has had high ratings, it is not due to its excellences, but to Netflix’s poor lineup. The world is tired of stories of criminals and thieves and longs for spiritual stories like that of Exodus. When will the world be able to see a series of saints and prophets financed as generously as this mediocre film? It is enough to take William James’ text “The Varieties of Religious Experience” to find its source of inspiration.
There is no worse director than one who does not believe in the story he is portraying; proof of this is horror films directed by atheist directors, and especially “Exodus: Gods and Kings”, an unimaginative film, full of clichés, with a disoriented protagonist, with atheist ideas that are refuted by the force of the biblical story that continues to inspire millions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers worldwide.
Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira 