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A numbing and soulless spectacle of 3-D, computer-generated imagery run amok, Ridley Scott ’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings” presents an enduring tale by pummeling us over the head with it.

The story of Moses rising up against the Pharaoh Ramses and leading hundreds of thousands of Hebrew slaves out of Egypt to freedom is one with which we’re all extremely familiar. It’s the entire point of Passover. Scott is not reinventing the wheel here. Rather, he’s invented the biggest, shiniest, noisiest wheel imaginable, then he runs over us with it rather than inviting us along for the ride.

Certainly, there’s an allure to seeing this sort of old-fashioned, biblical epic on the big screen–and indeed, within this proliferation of pixels, there is undeniable craft and heft to the massive set pieces and behemoth battles. From the costumes to the weaponry to the interiors, it’s obvious that Scott’s team took great care in considering and creating every detail. But the film as a whole (with a script credited to Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian ) feels overstuffed and over-glossed. Self-serious to a fault, it packs in more and more in terms of story and extravagant visuals while offering too little in terms of actual character development and engaging drama.

When he’s been at his absolute best in his lengthy career, directing films like “ Blade Runner ” and “ Alien ” and even "Thelma & Louise," Scott has established himself as a visionary and a master of creating imagery that would go on to be iconic. “Exodus” feels oddly impersonal. It’s hard to tell what Scott’s point is here, beyond making his Academy Award-winning “ Gladiator ” look like an independent film by comparison. Earlier this year, “Gladiator” star Russell Crowe played the title character in Darren Aronofsky ’s “ Noah .” That was a biblical epic which also was massive in scope but at the same time beautiful and strange; it stayed true to its source material but found an intriguing and challenging tone. It actually evoked emotion.

In “Exodus,” the plagues are fun, briefly, and that’s about it. At least, the prospect of the plagues presents the promise of fun: “Eww, gross, a massive pile of frogs,” or: “Aww, yeah, here come the locusts.” But like so much else in the film, these potentially thrilling sequences of havoc and terror evolve into enormous swarms digitally divorced from their effect on humanity. (The boils, though–they remain. And they’re nasty.)

It certainly doesn’t help that Christian Bale plays Moses in mostly stiff and detached fashion. (But hey, at least he’s more intelligible here than he is as a grumbling and tormented Batman). Here, he’s a quietly capable leader –a general among men, and in the eyes of the Pharaoh Seti ( John Turturro ), who raised Moses as his adopted son, clearly more capable to take over the kingdom than his own biological son, the preening and egotistical Ramses ( Joel Edgerton ). Despite the thick eyeliner, the shiny, bald pate and the radiant golden wardrobe, Edgerton is never quite flamboyant enough. He could have gone over the top with the role and helped breathe some life into this picture. He seems sadly uncomfortable.

Once it’s revealed that Moses is actually, you know, Jewish, he’s cast into exile, where he forges a pleasant, new life for himself as a sheepherder with a wife and a son. Meanwhile, over the past nine years, Ramses has assumed power and essentially turned Memphis into Las Vegas: overbuilt, overpopulated and so generally overwhelmed that slaves are being burned to death just to thin the place out. (It seems entirely possible that Scott does not get the irony of constructing something that is simply too big.)

It’s at this time that Moses starts seeing visions and receiving instructions as to his true purpose: to return to his homeland and free his people. God appears to him as an impish British schoolboy, which is a rather clever idea. In retrospect, Old Testament God does seem rather capricious and destructive in ways that remind me of my overtired 5-year-old son playing with his Legos after a long day at school. But that casting represents a rare moment of innovation in a film that may as well come with a checklist at the door. Even the parting of the Red Sea–which should be a spectacular event generating legitimate excitement–suggests the draining of a massive bathtub.

Ben Kingsley appears in a woefully small role as Nun, the elderly scholar who shares the news with Moses about his true heritage, yet he can’t help but infuse his few moments with great dignity. As Joshua, who helps Moses lead the slaves out of Egypt, Aaron Paul is mostly relegated to sticking by Moses’ side, a huge waste of both his presence and his ordinarily inspired instincts. Sigourney Weaver gets even less to do as Ramses’ haughty mother, Tuya, while Hiam Abbass , as Moses’ mother, Bithia, has only a handful of lines of dialogue.

So why is this blockbuster different from all other blockbusters? It’s not. There’s just more of it. And less.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

Rated PG-13 for violence including battle sequences and intense images

150 minutes

Christian Bale as Moses

Joel Edgerton as Rhamses

Aaron Paul as Joshua

Ben Kingsley as Nun

Ben Mendelsohn as Hegep

John Turturro as Seti

Sigourney Weaver as Tuya

Indira Varma as Miriam

María Valverde as Séfora

Golshifteh Farahani as Nefertari

• Ridley Scott
• Bill Collage
• Adam Cooper
• Steven Zaillian

Director of Photography

• Dariusz Wolski

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Movie Review: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “exodus: gods and kings.”.

By A.O. Scott

• Dec. 11, 2014

Longer than the average Hollywood feature film and shorter than the average Passover Seder, “Exodus: Gods and Kings” tells the well-known story of how Moses led the enslaved Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. The timing of the movie’s release — a few days before Hanukkah — may be a bit puzzling, but it does provide a nice bookend for 2014. We had a blockbuster Sunday school lesson in March in the form of Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah,” and now we have Ridley Scott’s attempt to bring another famous chunk of the Hebrew Bible to life, in 3-D no less.

“Noah,” with its stone giants and Emma Watson, may have been too strange for some viewers. “Exodus,” by contrast, crowded with well-known actors, is nowhere near strange enough. More than anything else, it recalls the wide-screen, Technicolor biblical pageants of the 1950s and early ’60s, bland and solemn spectacles that invited moviegoers to marvel at their favorite stars in sandals and robes.

The casting of “Exodus,” with mostly American, British and Australian actors in Middle Eastern and African roles, has raised some eyebrows, and while these choices represent a failure of imagination and sensitivity, they are also consistent with that old, stale tradition. So is the curious decision to encourage the performers to speak in strange, geographically and historically preposterous accents.

The Egyptian oppressors, with their heavy eyeliner and clingy linen robes, festoon their highfalutin pseudo-Oxbridge speech patterns with lisps and sighs. (The script is credited to a squad of competent dramaturges, none of them, alas, named Oscar Wilde.) John Turturro as the relatively nice pharaoh is out-camped only by Ben Mendelsohn as a corrupt, mincing viceroy. Even the manly and muscular Joel Edgerton as the bad pharaoh, Ramses, tries to play along, caressing snakes, fluttering his lashes and gorging on crab legs. Such women as there are in the movie — if you doze off you might miss Sigourney Weaver, Hiam Abbass and Tara Fitzgerald — mostly stand around holding trays and pitchers while the men thunder and hiss.

Strangest of all is Christian Bale as Moses, raised in the Egyptian royal court as a brother to Ramses and blind to his true heritage. Eventually, of course, Moses discovers his Jewish roots, which means that he stops shaving, starts herding goats and, unless my ears deceive me, takes to peppering his speech with stagy old-man Yiddish inflections, as though preparing to lead his people from the fleshpots of Egypt into a borscht belt Canaan. You think this desert is dry? You should try my wife’s brisket.

Alas, Mr. Scott is not Mel Brooks . “Exodus” is ludicrous only by accident, which isn’t much fun and is the surest sign of what we might call a New Testament sensibility at work. But the movie isn’t successfully serious, either. Not for the first time, Mr. Scott confuses excessive scale with authentic grandeur, and while some of the battle scenes have a rousing, kinetic sweep, there are far too many slow aerial surveys of Memphis, the Egyptian capital, a city bristling with columns and other priapic monuments.

To be fair, there is some good stuff here, too. Mr. Scott is a sinewy storyteller and a connoisseur of big effects. He turns the 10 plagues into a science-fiction apocalypse and stages the climactic pursuit of the Hebrews by the Egyptian army with the thundering precision of a cavalry battle in a John Ford western. (The parting of the Red Sea, unfortunately, is a digital washout.) But in the past, this director has also shown a knack for intimacy and intensity, for moments of feeling that stand out amid the fight-and-flight adrenaline rushes. Think of the eerie quiet of “Alien,” the whispery enigmas of “Blade Runner” or the loose, raw humor of “Thelma & Louise.”

That was a long time ago, and the committee-written script of “Exodus” has little room for the human dimensions of the story, which contains some of the most psychologically complex episodes in the Torah. The movie does provide a brief interlude of romance and domesticity, when Moses, stopping at an oasis, catches the eye of a kohl-eyed beauty with a blue tattoo on her lip. That would be Zipporah, whose tribe he joins for a while. They have a son, and Moses teaches him to throw a baseball — technically I guess you’d have to call it a rock — before destiny calls him away.

And when it does, “Exodus” becomes, briefly, an interesting movie. The biblical book of the same title tells two entwined stories. One is an epic of national liberation and self-assertion, in which the Israelites discover a political identity and begin to organize themselves as a people. The other is a kind of love story, about the often contentious relationship between the Israelites and their god, who is a complicated literary character, by turns compassionate and stern, steadfast and fickle. He and Moses don’t always get along.

In Mr. Scott’s film, God appears to Moses in the person of a young boy ( Isaac Andrews ), a bold and in some ways genuinely radical choice. His spooky, icy voice urges Moses toward extremism — a reversal of Mr. Aronofsky’s rendering of Genesis, in which Noah’s fanaticism goes beyond the divine mandate — for reasons that Moses is unable to understand. He wants to help free his people, but he also feels a residual kinship with Ramses, a bond that must be severed completely. His military insurgency is not enough.

While it lasts, though, “Exodus” has the makings of a provocative study of power, rebellion and loyalty. To paraphrase a Passover song, that would have been enough. What we get instead is both woefully insufficient and much too much.

“Exodus: Gods and Kings” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Blood, wild beasts, flies, boils, frogs, locusts, cattle disease, fire, darkness, death of the firstborn.

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‘exodus: gods and kings’: film review.

Ridley Scott's rendering of the Book of Exodus serves up most of the spectacular highlights of the biblical tale

By Stephen Farber

Stephen Farber

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2014 marks the resurgence of the Old Testament at the movies . After Darren Aronofsky turned to Genesis to unleash Noah , Ridley Scott moves forward to the Book of Exodus to revisit the story of Moses. Exodus: Gods and Kings is this century’s answer to Cecil B. DeMille ’s The Ten Commandments , but it already looks to be more controversial than that pious 1956 opus. Spectacularly filmed and intermittently well acted, though not quite as much campy fun as the DeMille version, the picture looks likely to attract a substantial audience even if some religious leaders voice protests.

Scott did a great job reviving the Roman sword-and-sandals epic when he made the Oscar-winning Gladiator . This Egyptian saga is not quite in the same league, but it confirms the director’s flair for widescreen imagery. Exodus has the added kick of 3D technology, and it has enough eye-popping set pieces to please adventure fans.

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Unlike the DeMille rendering, this one does not begin at the beginning but plunges us into the middle of the action, with Moses ( Christian Bale ) as an adult in the royal court. We eventually learn the backstory of how the Jewish child managed to find a home among the kings, but we’re introduced to him as a warrior and best friend of Ramses ( Joel Edgerton ). The first part of the movie cribs rather shamelessly from Gladiator , which began by sketching the rivalry between the emperor’s son and his favorite warrior. Here the aging Pharaoh, played by John Turturro , prefers his adopted son Moses to his own son Ramses. This tortured family drama was performed much more persuasively in Gladiator by Russell Crowe , Joaquin Phoenix  and Richard Harris . Despite an excess of mascara, Turturro is sympathetic, but he doesn’t fit all that comfortably into ancient Egypt.

An early battle scene against the Hittites, modeled very closely on the climactic battle scene between Arabs and Turks in Lawrence of Arabia , suggests that Moses is the superior warrior, which prepares for his eventual banishment once Ramses succeeds his father on the throne. But the friendship between the two soldiers is not well established in the opening scenes, so the film stumbles out of the gate. Four writers — Adam Cooper , Bill Collage , Jeffrey Caine  and Oscar winner Steven Zaillian — are credited with the screenplay, and they haven’t been able to craft an elegant narrative from the biblical text. The dialogue is often cringe-worthy, as when a surly Moses tells God, “Nice of you to come.”

Read more ‘Exodus’: How Ridley Scott Chose His 11-Year-Old Voice of God

When Moses learns his true identity, he is reluctant to play the role of savior, and he finds a comfortable home in a remote village, where he marries and has a son. But his destiny calls when he comes upon the famous burning bush and is approached by God to lead his people out of slavery.  Here is the film’s most controversial choice, for God appears to Moses as a fierce child . Although this may offend some devout viewers, it’s actually far more interesting than the booming offscreen voice that DeMille used in his version of the story. This divine child seems angry and vengeful rather than a benign Buddha figure, but one could argue that this is in keeping with the Old Testament God of wrath.

The film hits its peak in the sequence recounting the 10 plagues. The savage crocodiles were not in the Old Testament, but as they attack humans as well as fish, they turn the Nile blood red, which is at least an ingenious explanation of how the river might have turned to blood. Frogs, boils and locusts are truer to the text and are rendered in luscious visual detail.

Watch more Ridley Scott Explains Why He Made ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ in New Featurette

The climactic chase to the Red Sea is equally spectacular. Although The Ten Commandments won the Oscar for its visual effects, the parting of the Red Sea in DeMille’s film was laughably tacky. Scott comes up with a somewhat more credible portrayal of how the Israelites managed to cross the sea before a monumental storm drowned the Egyptians. This sequence is visually thrilling. The movie should have ended there, but Scott and the writers seem to have felt obliged to include a few of the later parts of the story, including the delivery of the Ten Commandments and a scene of an aged Moses finally arriving near the land of Canaan. But while these events are integral to the biblical story, they come off here as the worst kind of anticlimax.

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and production designer Arthur Max make impressive contributions, though some of the aerial shots of the Egyptian capital look a little too much like CGI-enhanced sets. Alberto Iglesias ’ score is overly bombastic.

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Don’t expect any acting nominations for the picture. Bale garbles a few too many of his lines, but he has an imposing physical presence. Edgerton is competent, but we miss the hammy exuberance of DeMille’s Ramses, Yul Brynner . Ben Mendelsohn , however, has fun with the role of the sniveling, treacherous viceroy who exposes Moses’ true heritage. Ben Kingsley adds gravitas as the elderly Jewish leader, but most of the other actors are stranded with far too little to do. Sigourney Weaver is completely wasted as Ramses’ conniving mother, and Breaking Bad ’s Aaron Paul barely registers in the underwritten role of Joshua. Maria Valverde is strikingly beautiful as Moses’ wife, Zipporah, but her role is just as skimpy as most of the others.

No movie with such a limp ending can be fully satisfying, and the beginning also falters. But the long middle section is a rousing good show.

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Cast: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Ben Mendelsohn, Maria Valverde, Golshifteh Farahani, Indira Varma, Hiam Abbass Director: Ridley Scott Screenwriters: Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine, Steven Zaillian Producers: Ridley Scott, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Michael Schaeffer, Mark Huffam Director of photography: Dariusz Wolski Production designer: Arthur Max Costume designer: Janty Yates Editor: Billy Rich Music: Alberto Iglesias

Rated PG-13, 150 minutes

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Film Review: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’

An improbably Anglo-led cast aside, Ridley Scott's Old Testament epic is a genuinely imposing spectacle.

By Justin Chang

Justin Chang

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“It’s not even that good a story,” Moses grumbles early on in Ridley Scott ‘s “ Exodus: Gods and Kings ,” shortly after learning of the mysterious events that transformed a lowly Hebrew slave into a full-blown prince of Egypt. It’s a sly, knowing wink from a filmmaker who clearly has a terrific tale on his hands, yet faces a bit of a challenge in selling it to a more cynical, less easily razzle-dazzled audience than those that greeted the biblical epics of yesteryear. What’s remarkable about Scott’s genuinely imposing Old Testament psychodrama is the degree to which he succeeds in conjuring a mighty and momentous spectacle — one that, for sheer astonishment, rivals any of the lavish visions of ancient times the director has given us — while turning his own skepticism into a potent source of moral and dramatic conflict.

If this estimable account of how God delivered His people out of Egypt feels like a movie for a decidedly secular age, its searching, non-doctrinaire approach arguably gets closer to penetrating the mystery of faith than a more fawning approach might have managed. Like “Noah,” the year’s other nonconformist Judeo-Christian blockbuster, this is an uncommonly intelligent, respectful but far-from-reverent outsider’s take on Scripture, although “Exodus” is less madly eccentric and more firmly grounded in the sword-and-sandal tradition than Darren Aronofsky’s film, and will almost certainly prove less polarizing among believers. Even with a hefty $140 million pricetag and a two-and-a-half-hour running time to overcome, Fox’s year-end release (opening Dec. 12 Stateside) should ride 3D ticket premiums and general curiosity to muscular returns worldwide, landing closer to “Gladiator” than “Kingdom of Heaven” territory in terms of audience satisfaction and commercial payoff.

If there’s a controversial talking point here, it’s that Scott’s film continues the dubious tradition of casting white actors in an English-language picture set at the meeting point of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the injustice of yet another major historical drama ceding the big roles to Hollywood royalty while relegating blacks, Arabs and other actors of color to the background: In addition to Christian Bale ‘s star turn as Moses, “Exodus” features Joel Edgerton as his stepbrother, Ramses — a transformation made reasonably convincing through state-of-the-art bronzing techniques and heavy applications of guyliner (plus the exquisitely bejeweled costumes designed by Janty Yates). Yet while these are problematic choices, dictated by commercial imperatives as old as Methuselah, they are also reservations one willingly suspends as the strength of the performances and the irresistible pull of the story take hold.

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Scott’s choice of material hasn’t always been as reliable as his visual sense, but the Exodus account provides him with some solid if well-worn narrative scaffolding; given that we’ve all seen or heard some version of this story, the film’s four credit screenwriters (Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian) seem to instinctively grasp that a completist version would be ambitious but unnecessary. You know you’re in trustworthy hands when the film begins not with an infant floating among the reeds, but with Bale’s fully grown Moses living in the palace of the aging pharaoh Seti (John Turturro) — one of many ways in which the script shrewdly foregoes the usual framing devices in favor of a crisp, present-tense retelling.

The film swiftly establishes the brotherly bond between Moses, a favored general in Seti’s army, and Ramses, the proud pharaoh-to-be, their intimate yet rivalrous relationship sealed by the matching swords they wear into battle. Moses shows his mettle, and inadvertently fulfills a mysterious prophecy, by saving Ramses’ life in a large-scale Egyptian attack on the Hittites, an excitingly staged collision of horses and chariots, lensed by d.p. Dariusz Wolski with a mix of soaring overhead shots and ground-level combat footage.

Shortly thereafter, Moses pays a fateful visit to the city of Pithom, affording us a close-up look at the cruel machinery that has kept the Israelites enslaved for 400 years, toiling endlessly to build palaces and pyramids for their whip-cracking overlords. (The re-creation of ancient Egypt reps a staggering collaboration between production designer Arthur Max and visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang, supplemented by location shooting in Almeria, Spain, a desert backdrop made famous by “Lawrence of Arabia.”) Unsettled by these glimpses of a genocide in progress, as well as by his lifelong identity crisis, Moses eventually learns the truth of his Hebrew lineage from Nun (Ben Kingsley), a wise Jewish elder. Before long, the secret falls into the hands of a calculating Egyptian viceroy (a wonderfully louche and loathsome Ben Mendelsohn), hastening Moses’ exit from the royal family and Egypt altogether.

Propelling the film through these absorbing early passages is Bale’s broodingly intelligent Moses, a cool, eloquent man of reason who disdains the God of Israel as well as the innumerable deities of Egypt, yet whose calm, rational demeanor can also be provoked to murderous fits of fury. The story of “Exodus: Gods and Kings” hinges on the gradual reshaping of his beliefs and the healing of his fractured identity: Humbled and exiled, he makes his way to Midian, where he becomes a shepherd and marries the beautiful Zipporah (Maria Valverde), though he has a difficult time truly accepting his place among the Hebrews and the Lord they worship.

It’s telling that Moses’ first divine encounter finds him almost completely submerged in mud, literally a man about to be reformed. Purists may balk at the notion of God taking on the earthly form of a cherubic angel, Malak (Isaac Andrews), whose petulant manner and British elocution at times suggest a very young Voldemort. It’s a mild provocation of sorts, a means of getting us to see the Lord as a skeptic, like Moses would initially: callous and whimsical by turns, a jealous, vengeful deity with a literally childish streak. Before long, God orders His servant to trigger a horrific campaign of destruction against Egypt, where the Hebrews are perishing in ever greater numbers under Ramses’ oppressive rule.

At once honoring and eclipsing the showmanship of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956), the final hour of “Exodus: Gods and Kings” is a sensationally entertaining yet beautifully modulated stream of visual wonders that make it all but impossible to tear one’s eyes from the screen. In one of his boldest strokes, Scott dramatizes the 10 plagues in a seamless, vividly realistic domino-effect montage — the bloody despoiling of the Nile (which takes a surprising page from “Jaws”) naturally giving way to a proliferation of gnats and frogs, boils and locusts — that truly does seem to capture the intensity of God’s wrath in one furious, unrelenting deluge. In keeping with the momentum established by Billy Rich’s editing and the superb vfx work, this Moses does not return to Ramses day after day with fresh entreaties of “Let my people go,” but instead remains in hiding, watching ambivalently as the Lord does their fighting for them.

“You don’t always agree with me,” God says to Moses, effectively inviting all viewers, regardless of persuasion, to wrestle with their own conflicted impulses. Scott, a self-professed agnostic whose films have nonetheless betrayed a restless spiritual dimension (particularly “Prometheus”), seems to have been inspired by his distance from the material, placing his identification with a hero who never stops questioning himself or the God he follows. Not unlike Russell Crowe’s Noah, and rather unlike Charlton Heston’s iconic barn-stormer, Bale’s Moses emerges a painfully flawed, embattled leader whose direct line to the Almighty is as much burden as blessing — and who wearily recognizes that once the Israelites have cast off the shackles of slavery, the truly hard work of governance, progress, repentance and faithfulness will begin.

Edgerton, his dark-rimmed eyes asmolder with pride and contempt, makes a powerfully understated Ramses, one who is not without his own measure of humanity: “What kind of fanatics worship such a God?!” he splutters amid the devastation of the final plague. Arriving at a time when religious divisions in the Middle East have become all too violently pronounced, the ideal of a Promised Land ever more elusive, it’s a question that resonates well beyond the story’s specific moment. And it lingers even as the film presses on toward its Red Sea climax — a brilliantly attenuated sequence that Scott stages with breathtaking suspense and deliberation, the massive CG-rendered waves never threatening to overwhelm the fraternal turmoil at the story’s core. (The theme of brotherhood torn asunder becomes unavoidably haunting when the film reveals its closing dedication to the late Tony Scott.)

That central dynamic is essential, since none of the other characters here registers with particular force: Moses’ right-hand man, Aaron (Andrew Barclay Tarbet), is reduced to a bit part, while his comrade Joshua (Aaron Paul) gets similarly short shrift, despite a memorable introduction. Elsewhere, the film’s revisionist strategy doesn’t do much to elevate the dramatic stature of the female characters: As Seti’s calculating wife Tuya, Sigourney Weaver (teaming with Scott for the third time) has little to do besides look wonderfully imperious in a Cleopatra headdress, although Hiam Abbass does manage a few emotionally charged moments as Moses’ foster mother, Bithia. As Moses’ and Ramses’ respective wives, Valverde and Golshifteh Farahani serve mainly decorative functions.

Although long enough at 150 minutes, Scott’s epic is over an hour shorter than DeMille’s, and key events — including the Israelites’ descent into idol-worshipping chaos — have been skillfully elided, perhaps awaiting a “Kingdom of Heaven”-style director’s cut. The result feels less like a straightforward retread of the biblical narrative than an amped-up commentary on it: This “Exodus” comes at you in a heady and violent onrush of incident, propelled along by Alberto Iglesias’ vigorous score, teeming with large-scale crowd and battle sequences (which take on an especially rich, tactile quality in 3D), and packed with unexpectedly rousing martial episodes, including one where Moses attempts to train his people for battle.

Some may well desire a purer, fuller version of the story, one more faithful to the text and less clearly shaped by the demands of the Hollywood blockbuster. But on its own grand, imperfect terms, “Exodus: Gods and Kings” is undeniably transporting, marked by a free-flowing visual splendor that plays to its creator’s unique strengths: Given how many faith-based movies are content to tell their audiences what to think or feel, it’s satisfying to see one whose images alone are enough to compel awestruck belief.

Reviewed at 20th Century Fox Studios, Los Angeles, Nov. 24, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 150 MIN.

• Production: A 20th Century Fox release and presentation in association with TSG Entertainment of a Chernin Entertainment/Scott Free production. Produced by Peter Chernin, Ridley Scott, Jenno Topping, Michael Schaefer, Mark Huffam. Co-producer, Adam Somner.
• Crew: Directed by Ridley Scott. Screenplay, Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine, Steven Zaillian. Camera (color, widescreen, Red Digital Cinema, 3D), Dariusz Wolski; editor, Billy Rich; music, Alberto Iglesias; production designer, Arthur Max; supervising art directors, Marc Holmes, Benjamin Fernandez; art directors, Alex Cameron, Gavin Fitch, Matt Wynne; set decorators, Celia Bobak, Pilar Revuelta; costume designer, Janty Yates; sound (Dolby Atmos), David Stephenson; supervising sound editor/designer, Oliver Tarney; re-recording mixers, Paul Massey, Mark Taylor; special effects supervisor, Pau Costa; visual effects supervisor, Peter Chiang; visual effects producers, Jamie Stevenson, Tim Keene; visual effects, Double Negative, MPC, Scanline, Method Studios, Lola Post, Peerless; stunt coordinator, Rob Inch; 3D conversion, Stereo D; line producer (U.K.), Mary Richards; associate producer, Teresa Kelly; assistant director, Lee Grumett; second unit director, Luke Scott; second unit camera, Flavio Labiano; casting, Nina Gold.
• With: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Mendelsohn, Maria Valverde, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, Isaac Andrews, Hiam Abbass, Indira Varma, Ewen Bremner, Golshifteh Farahani, Ghassan Massoud, Tara Fitzgerald, Maria Valverde, Andrew Barclay Tarbet.

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Exodus: Gods and Kings

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While sporadically stirring, and suitably epic in its ambitions, Exodus: Gods and Kings can't quite live up to its classic source material.

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Ridley Scott

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Exodus: Gods and Kings Review

Exodus: Gods and Kings works best when it's about Christian Bale's unique Moses and his desire to discipline God.

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Ridley Scott is deliberately walking over holy ground with Exodus: Gods and Kings , and I’m not just talking about the old Hebrew tale. Oft repeated, the story of Moses and his spiritual battle with Pharaoh is nonetheless most associated in the collective imagination with Charlton Heston, shrouded in a ridiculously big bushy beard, parting the Red Sea with almost as much fanaticism as his director Cecil B. DeMille exuded in mounting The Ten Commandments . Twice.

Yet, Scott’s own Exodus: Gods and Kings comes from a very different place and with a refreshingly inventive take on Moses. As embodied by a boisterously fierce Christian Bale, the man who went up the mountain came back down ready to kick some ass, be it that of Egyptians, doubting Hebrews, or even Exodus’ peculiar representation of God Himself. Most of all, however, Scott zeroes this story in on the brotherhood of Moses and Rhamses, and what it means to lose it. This knowing agony informs the movie well enough to overcome its own considerable plagues (of which there are many).

At the risk of sounding redundant in the 21 st century, Exodus: Gods and Kings is the well-worn story of Moses and his journey from Prince of Egypt to Liberator of the Israelites. Skipping much of the stilted pageantry associated with his legend, the film opens on Moses (Bale) as already a man full grown. He’s the cousin and brother of heir apparent Rhamses (Joel Edgerton), but the preferred child of Rhamses’ father, the Pharaoh Seti (John Turturro). Thus, there is immediately friction between the lads long before Moses is revealed to actually be a Hebrew slave who was spared a monstrous fate when his mother and sister placed him in a basket on the river.

A threat to Rhamses’ legitimacy due to a pro-Moses military, and a downright loathsome irritation to Egyptian Queen Tuya (Sigourney Weaver), the young prince’s days in court would have likely been numbered, but the revelations from Nun (Ben Kingsley) certainly expedited matters. Exiled in the desert where he finds the love of a good woman (Maria Valverde), Moses also finds God. Literally. And the deity has quite the mission for this lifelong secularist now uncomfortably garbed in shepherd’s clothing.

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Much has been made in the press as of late about the mostly white cast of Exodus: Gods and Kings , and it is not entirely wrong to question if North Africa ever looked this WASPy. However, it’s also a story in which rivers turn to blood, and God commits mass infanticide during a 400-year period of Hebrew enslavement that has not a shred of historical evidence in all of Egypt. In other words, just go with it as a Bible story.

That is certainly Scott’s approach, as he utilizes all of his ancient world building extravagance from Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven to make his most action-packed and strangely light-hearted “Old Times” picture to date. Not feeling nearly as bound by creating a historical reality as those aforementioned films, Exodus: Gods and Kings has a definite allegorical intangibility to it wherein Scott is emboldened to unpack the relationship between Moses and Rhamses, and eventually Moses and God.

While the rest of the characters are thinly sketched at best, Moses and Rhamses’ struggle is always heartfelt, allowing Bale and Edgerton to provide some weight to the CGI opulence of man-eating crocodiles and hordes of locusts. The film is dedicated to Tony Scott, and somewhere in the picture, there is a more personal narrative that Scott likely wanted to explore about these two men that treat the Wrath of God as merely inconvenient weather when it comes time for a showdown.

However, the real strength of the movie comes from a very modern perspective on Moses. As the paterfamilias of religious saviors, it is odd to see Moses spend over an hour of the movie as essentially an atheist, doubting the Egyptian gods well before he continues doubting the Hebrew one—until he runs into a burning bush. Fitting the actor and director’s own sensibilities, this Moses is exhaustedly human, as well as very cynical of all spirituality until he becomes a growling, fiery, and even maniacal messenger for it.

Christian Bale, using his real accent, plays Moses like a tenured professor that was forced against his will to become the half-crazed pit preacher, screaming the end is nigh on the side of the Quad. It’s not scripture, but far more than all the CGI plagues, it’s riveting. And more importantly, it offers the film’s most interesting and soon-to-be controversial aspect: God is a 10-year-old child.

Moses meets God throughout the film in the face of a preadolescent boy whose tempestuous temper is scolded by the rapidly aging Bale. Their dynamic is thus a far more anti-authority Moses trying to argue with a child about why the murder of thousands of babes is cruel. This will undoubtedly enrage some of the faithful, but it certainly would explain a lot about the Old Testament’s God versus the New Testament counterpart. Perhaps puberty kicked in?

Less successful is Scott’s further attempt to “ground” Moses with an over reliance on his alluded militarism. Scott amusingly uses superior battlefield prowess as a reason for the Egyptian military’s initial reluctance to apprehend their former general (think Maximus and Commodus), but the result is far too many scenes of God’s Chosen People choosing to take bow and arrow to Egyptians in guerrilla tactics. Ironically, it’s more thrilling than anything in Scott’s Robin Hood misfire, but instead of enlivening Exodus’ pace with some undoubtedly studio mandated machismo, it slows the running time to a crawl until God puts on a show.

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One imagines that in another world, Scott and Bale would have loved to do the whole Moses movie like this—where the hero’s link to divinity is ambiguous at best and he wins the day by military cunning and fortuitous climate conditions. But doing that picture at this budget (and in this country) would be a miracle unto itself.

Overall, the pace is still relatively nimble in the expanse of Biblical Epics. While you feel every minute of Exodus’ regal 150 minutes, it is downright breezy when compared to the third act slog of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah , not to mention The Ten Commandments’ nigh four-hour sermon. Comparably, Exodus is succinct, perhaps too much so when one realizes that all the characters not named Moses or Rhamses amount to glorified cameos (Aaron Paul’s Joshua is more or less an extra), thanklessly reciting their pious and leaden dialogue.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a dutiful retelling of Moses that’s up to modern special effects standards, and it finds a genuine humanity in Moses’ brotherly love, as well as his struggles of doubt with Boy God. As a result, 21 st century Moses avoids many of the pratfalls of DeMille’s laborious pageant. There are no entire hours listlessly devoted to Anne Baxter’s crocodile tears or the construction of a golden calf; Moses is played by a legitimate actor who finds a pulse to the marble statue (as opposed to being one); and, most of all, it doesn’t feel like you spent half a day getting slapped in the face by DeMille and his notorious casts of thousands with those precious stone tablets.

Still, for all of the amusing upgrades to this multiplex exodus, it never quite achieves the level of wide-eyed zealotry and obvious love for the material as seen in Chuck Heston decreeing, “Let my people go.” Even if Exodus: Gods and Kings is the better movie, it can never truly be the better movie. Coming down from the mountain with skepticism, Exodus ultimately leaves viewers as exactly that. But it does so in such grand style.

***This review was originally published on December 4, 2014.

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2.5 out of 5

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

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Exodus: gods and kings, common sense media reviewers.

Moody Biblical battle epic about Moses is gory and dull.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Moses overcomes enormous challenges, solves proble

Moses is usually a clear hero, but in this version

Heavy fantasy-style action violence. Gruesome &quo

A married couple kisses; sex is indicated.

The pharaoh appears to drink wine with his meals.

Parents need to know that Exodus: Gods and Kings is an epic retelling of the Biblical story of Moses freeing the Jewish slaves from the evil Egyptian pharaohs. There's lots of gruesome violence, particularly in the depiction of the seven plagues, with shocking amounts of blood, death, destruction, chaos,…

Positive Messages

Moses overcomes enormous challenges, solves problems, and learns empathy. But some of the messages get muddled/conflicted in the movie's action sequences and because of parts of the story that were cut out.

Positive Role Models

Moses is usually a clear hero, but in this version he seems uneasy with God's help, and the use of the seven plagues seems rather gruesome. (You almost feel sorry for the bad guys.) He can also be violent and sullen and quarrelsome. Still, he's heroic enough to rescue hundreds of thousands of slaves and bring them a new life and new freedom.

Violence & Scariness

Heavy fantasy-style action violence. Gruesome "seven plagues," with strong terror, blood, death, destruction, and chaos. Fighting. Lots of blood and death. Dead children. Dead bodies. Bird entrails. Dead horses. Slave whipping. Several people hanged. Falling from cliff. Tidal wave and drowning.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Exodus: Gods and Kings is an epic retelling of the Biblical story of Moses freeing the Jewish slaves from the evil Egyptian pharaohs. There's lots of gruesome violence, particularly in the depiction of the seven plagues, with shocking amounts of blood, death, destruction, chaos, and terror. Dead children and animals are seen. There's also lots of fighting, hangings, slaves being whipped, and a terrifying tidal wave. On the other hand, sex and drinking/drugs are minimal, and language and consumerism aren't an issue. The film has drawn some criticism for "whitewashing" history by casting Caucasian actors in the roles of Middle Eastern characters. Teens who are on the fence about seeing a Biblical epic may be swayed by the movie's action factor, and Moses' story is still there -- and still worth telling and discussing, even though he's not portrayed as a saintly hero. But kids and tweens are strongly warned away; stick with either The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt instead. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 14 parent reviews

Just typical violence

This is the best movie in that decade, what's the story.

As kids, Moses and Rhamses grew up together in the palace of Rhamses' father ( John Turturro ). As adults, Rhamses ( Joel Edgerton ) rules Egypt, with Moses ( Christian Bale ) as his trusted counsel. While inspecting a division of Jewish slaves, a wise man ( Ben Kingsley ) informs Moses that he, too, is Jewish. When Rhamses finds out, Moses is banished. He meets and marries Sefora (Maria Valverde) and starts life anew ... until God contacts him (in the form of a boy) and tells him that he must free the 600,000 people enslaved under the pharaoh. God assists by sending seven deadly plagues, but then Moses must lead the people across the Red Sea and into the promised land.

Is It Any Good?

EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS has a somber, dreary quality, punctuated by a thrumming, droning music score. Director Ridley Scott has made some great films, but he seems drawn to huge battle epics, like Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood , which he doesn't seem particularly suited to. The mood of this film doesn't invite anything in the way of an emotional or spiritual connection.

Nor does it allow many of the actors much of anything to do. Bale is both serious and battle-ready, and several other recognizable actors appear as window dressing. Only Edgerton as Rhamses brings a little heart to his under-confident villain. Some choices, such as God appearing as a creepy kid, are simply strange. Only the plagues sequence offers a kind of distraction, but even that quickly turns disturbingly dark. Earlier Moses films ( The Ten Commandments , The Prince of Egypt , etc.) were at least campy or funny, but this one isn't even entertaining.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Exodus: Gods and Kings ' violence , especially during the "seven plagues" sequence. Does the movie go too far, or is this violence necessary to convey the movie's story and themes?

Is Moses a hero in this story? What does he achieve? What does he learn? Is he a role model ?

What's the appeal of Biblical epics like this one? What is the Moses story about, ultimately?

Why do you think the filmmakers choose to show God as a child? Is God fair? Wise? Cruel? What is his motivation in freeing the slaves?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 12, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : March 17, 2015
• Cast : Christian Bale , Joel Edgerton , Ben Kingsley
• Director : Ridley Scott
• Inclusion Information : Indian/South Asian actors
• Studio : Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : History
• Run time : 150 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : violence including battle sequences and intense images
• Last updated : April 18, 2024

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Exodus: Gods and Kings review – holy Moses, wholly acceptable for the devout

Ridley Scott’s 3D Moses biopic is very long, very camp and very grim. But one thing it isn’t is offensive – unless you mean the panpipes

Profile: Ridley Scott

“W elcome to Pithom! You’ll get used to the smell.” So says Ben Mendelsohn at the start of Ridley Scott’s Moses movie. For a while now, people detected something fishy about Exodus, what with the all-white casting and Scott’s reassurance there’d be a scientifically watertight explanation for that Red Seas business .

Might it turn out as non-kosher as Noah , 2014’s other Old Testament epic? Yet the final film, released in the UK on Boxing Day, looks set down to slip down if not a treat, then certainly smoother than anticipated. It is half turkey, half triumph – with an odour to match.

We start in ancient Egypt, as conceived by someone who’s spent a lot of time in Beverly Hills hotel lobbies. There are marble halls and indoors ivy, lavish fruit platters and topless slaves fanning toga-clad groupies. This is home for two brothers, Moses and Ramses, the first (Christian Bale) earnest in a towelling dressing gown, the other (Joel Edgerton) only opting for clothes if they’re gold, and then generally just a skirt and choker.

Pious Moses dotes on dying dad, the pharaoh Seti (John Turturro). Ramses stomps off to fondle his pythons. Moses thinks the slaves should be freed. Ramses disagrees. “From an economic standpoint alone, what you say is problematic – to say the least.” (Dialogue quality is sacrificed at the altar of accessibility.)

Why does Moses stand out? It’s not just his liberal sensibility, nor his rejection of guyliner. It’s because he’s actually a Hebrew discovered in the rushes and adopted by Ramses’s sister – information confided to him by Jewish elder Ben Kingsley, then leaked by Mendelsohn’s slimy viceroy. Moses is duly exiled to the desert where he shacks up with a girl he meets at the well, whom he woos by being sweet to a sheep. They have a son, but a head injury triggers visions telling Moses to return to home and check up on Ramses’s reign.

All Hollywood’s takes on the tale – from Cecil B DeMille’s The 10 Commandments to Dreamworks’s The Prince of Egypt – have run with the sibling rivalry angle, despite scant supporting evidence. In Scott’s case, it was a good call. There’s an integrity at work here which finds full force in the final reel, as Moses tries to save Ramses from himself, then turns terribly potent in end-title dedication to Scott’s own brother, Tony.

But Exodus trades in other myths too: most obviously a superhero origins story - quasi-Thor, vaguely Star Wars , in which a man must face up to murky origins in order to save the world. Must abandon his child, too – as in Interstellar, a film which Exodus weirdly resembles, right down to the terrible weather. There’s also some Arthurian rhetoric involving a special sword; a dash of Hunger Games, with the massed rebels and flaming archery.

At times, it can feel like the Bible is the least key text. Yet the devout have less to worry about than many suspected. The main story arc, even co-opted by a secular director such as Scott, remains the hubris of acting immortal. Ramses doesn’t just make the error of declaring himself God, he expresses his divine entitlement through the contemporary foible of over-ambitious home improvement.

Pre-plague Pithom is basically a building site, a big budget episode of Grand Designs in which Ramses berates his architect, who thinks they ought to have prioritised the tomb, not the temple. So when the river fills with blood and rotting fish (“How long will that take to purify”) it feels less like a harbinger of apocalypse than just another construction hiccup.

The plagues are as well rendered as you’d hope given the $200m budget and cutting edge tech. Scott adds crocodiles and sharks to the mix and you do get a sense of relentless assault, what with the boils and the hail, the dead babies and the vomiting bulls. Even Moses himself has words with the Lord: “Is that it, are you done?”

In The Ten Commandments, God’s voice boomed back out at him from behind the burning bush; one of Scott’s innovations is God appearing to Moses as a 10-year-old boy. For Christian audiences who don’t find the Italia Conti intonation grating, this will likely be fine – a creative reading of God speaking in a still, small voice . The seas parting, too, are presented as all His work; there’s no forecast of how a cold front may result in tsunami-like conditions.

Yet as the mood turns bleak, the film becomes if not quite grinding, then certainly remorselessly grim, fixated on mortality, beaches filled with feasting vultures, seas studded with bloated corpses.

This should be affecting stuff, but it’s consistently undercut by the massively naff aesthetic. In particular Alberto Iglesias’s horrendous score, all Casio choirs and panpipes, which serves to neuter even the most human moments. It’s impossible not to feel some awe at the spectacle, but more shocks would have helped see you through the two-and-a-half hour running time. As Moses eventually staggers down with his tablets, looking every day of 120, your chief sense is not excitement at the founding of a faith but relief you can both, finally, clock off.

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Most viewed.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Banish all memories of a hambone, harrumphing Old Testament Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, the 1956 campfest that TV shoves at us during religious holidays. DeMille’s once-thrilling parting of the Red Sea plays today like CG primitivism.

Director Ridley Scott ( Gladiator ) is determined not to make his Exodus: Gods and Kings old-hat. But he’s after way more than FX pow – although wait until you see that Red Sea heave in 3D and the damage done by those 10 deadly plagues, from crocodiles, frogs and locusts to the death of every first-born in Egypt.

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Shooting on location, mostly in Spain, with thousands of non-digital extras, the ferociously cinematic Scott aims to keep things real and raw. He gets that and more from Christian Bale , in rousing form, as a hot-blooded warrior Moses ready to question all comers, including the gods and kings of the title. After learning of his Hebrew identity, Moses rises up against a childhood pal, the pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton), and builds the mettle he needs to lead 600,000 Israelite slaves out of Egypt.

Like Darren Aronofsky in Noah, Scott, who crafted the script with four other writers, departs from Scripture enough to raise hackles. For example, this Moses sees God in the person of an insolent schoolboy (Isaac Andrews), who takes guff from Moses for waiting 400 years to get around to freeing the slaves. In the large cast, including Aaron Paul, Ben Kingsley and John Turturro, Sigourney Weaver stands out as the mother of Ramses. “I don’t want Moses exiled,” she snaps. “I want him dead.” You get the picture. Exodus is a biblical epic that comes at you at maximum velocity but stays stirringly, inspiringly human.

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Exodus: Gods and Kings review - biblically irreverent but powerful cinema

Should you go and see Exodus?   If you are looking for classic Ridley Scott movie along the lines of 'Gladiator' or 'Alien' then sadly, no. 'Exodus: Gods and Kings' is nowhere near as innovative. And if you're hoping for a biblically faithful retelling of the book of Exodus – then again, no. Scott plays fast and loose with the scriptures, making some huge deviations for artistic effect. But, if you want a talking point movie that will make you gasp, think and wonder then this film is a real treat.

There are so many brilliant conversations that can be had off the back of this film. Here are a few.

1. Why do these big stories endure?

Ridley Scott is not afraid of a big story. Whether it's the supreme feminist movie of the 90s 'Thelma and Louise', the genre-defining sci-fi classic 'Alien' or the heroic icon 'Gladiator', Scott has a full house of genuinely epic must-see movies under his belt. Scott is rich and successful enough that he doesn't need this film, and yet somehow this biblical story has got under his skin and he has given years of his life to bring it to the screen.

The book of Exodus is part of the five-part origin narrative, not just of the Jewish nation, but of humanity itself, and these stories will not go away despite secularist cynicism and mockery. Indeed, Scott's movie comes hot on the heels of Darren Aronofsky's 'Noah', and rumours are circulating about Scott planning a biopic of King David.

2. Is God a delusion?

Scott makes some controversial choices. He gives Moses a handy head injury to initiate a conversion experience. When Moses speaks with God, it's clear that everyone else just sees Moses speaking to himself. A naturalistic counter-narrative is offered to the miraculous plagues, and even the parting of the Red Sea coincides with a meteor strike and a resulting tsunami. Is Scott trying to demythologise the story, looking for an escape route to placate atheist critics, or avoid the truth of the miraculous interventions of God and their implications? Are we supposed to conclude that God is simply a delusion?

But, even in Scott's suggestion that the miracles in Exodus are coincidental events, there is no arguing with their supernatural timing. Just when Moses is telling Pharaoh to let God's people go, the Nile turns to blood and the plagues begin. And when Israel needs an escape route out of Egypt, a way through the sea opens up.

For me, the words that appear on the screen at the start of the film are instructive: "After 400 years in slavery in Egypt the Hebrews had not forgotten their homeland... or their God. And God had not forgotten them." A faith that endured that long under those conditions is testament to the reality of God, as is the incredible account of the liberation of a minority ethnic group from the Egyptian superpower. So is the fact that thousands of years later these stories are still being retold. God has not forgotten us and we have not forgotten him. We are still a God-haunted culture.

3. What does God look like?

It is notoriously difficult to portray God on film. A disembodied voice doesn't really seem to cut it at this moment in cinematic history. We've already seen Morgan Freeman play God and subvert the caucasian stereotype, and now perhaps it's time to subvert Freeman's mild-mannered septuagenarian God. British actor Isaac Andrews was just 11 years old when he was called upon to play literally the biggest role in the universe.

But it seems that Andrews has been asked to portray God as moody, malevolent and mischievous. Christian Bale, who plays Moses, has been quoted describing God in the Exodus story as "Mercurial", and Scott has definitely made his God character fickle and erratic. This is seen clearly in Scott's handling of one of the the most difficult passages in the Bible: God's decision to make the last of the ten plagues the killing of the first born son in every Egyptian household. There is an angry shouting match between Moses and God. Moses argues that this is barbaric revenge and says he will have no part in it. The events of the Passover are thus portrayed as a bad decision made by a stroppy child.

This is religious art – a riff on the biblical story, not a faithful re-enactment. But in this depiction of God I think Scott has unhelpfully infantilised God, defamed his character and belittled his glory. This is perhaps a sign of the times, that a visionary director such as Scott either sees God has insignificant or wishes to depict him as such. But despite my reservations, Scott has also desentimentalised a relationship with God. Too often movies have portrayed spirituality as some kind of ecstatic state of perpetual serenity. Scott has read enough of the book of Exodus and the Psalms to know that a relationship with God can be loud and argumentative. And he seems to understand that God doesn't have to fit our expectations or traditions

4. Whose side are you on?

For a movie maker who loves the idea of a romantic hero – a lone figure who uses all his rhetoric, intellect and skill in combat to overcome an impossible enemy – it's not surprising that Moses is recast as a military genius leading a terrorist uprising against the Egyptians. There's a classic montage where Moses trains people to fight with swords, bows, arrows and, strangely, explosives. The film later turns into a face-off between Rameses and Moses, almost culminating in hand to hand combat in the middle of a tsunami.

This relationship reminded me of the Dreamworks animation 'The Prince of Egypt' (which gets a name check mid-movie by the way). As I watched this 'Exodus' in the middle of the pre-Christmas rush, the question in my mind by the Exodus story was 'Are you on God's side?' Our version of Christmas favours the rich – those who can afford all the trimmings, the latest tech, and expensive outfits. But the Exodus story is clear that God was not on the side of the excesses of the Egyptian aristocracy, he was on the side of the poor and downtrodden.

Super Special Effects

• Was Moses a freedom fighter or terrorist? Christian Bale on Exodus
• 11-year-old British schoolboy is voice of God in Ridley Scott's Exodus movie
• Christian Bale's initial reaction when Ridley Scott asked him to play Moses:'Oh no'
• Christian Bale says Moses is 'schizophrenic and barbaric'
• Krish Kandiah: Why Left Behind is best left alone
• Christian Bale says he had 'no idea about Moses at all' and his Bible knowledge was 'below Sunday school'
• Exodus: Gods and Kings - new trailer focuses on the 10 plagues

This film is a visual feast. There are some absolutely breathtaking shots and the set pieces are done with relish. The Ten Plagues are aesthetically lavish, the panoramic views of ancient Egypt are spell-binding, and of course the closing (rather than the parting) of the Red Sea leaves you, along with the Egyptian army, gasping for breath.

But sometimes a feast can be too indulgent. Scott seemed to have more CGI budget than he needed, so we get crazy crocodiles in the Nile that turn the river red, a shark in the Red Sea, not to mention redundant tornadoes and landslides wiping out Egyptian charioteers. As if the story wasn't big enough already, Scott chucks in some extra embellishments. 

Thanks to the charity Damaris I was given a ticket to the 'Exodus' world premier in London's Leicester Square. As I made my way along the red carpet I heard voices shouting "Christian, Christian, Christian" I looked around wanting to say "Yes that's me and I am not ashamed" but it turns out that they were calling for Christian 'batman' Bale who was ahead of me on the carpet.

As I left the cinema having being moved, provoked, angered and delighted in equal measure, I was encouraged that a huge global audience will get to wrestle with a fresh retelling of this powerful story. My prayer is that many would see the movie and be driven back to the Bible to read the full story of Moses. As they read, I pray they would come to know the full story of the God who hears the suffering of his people, brings us life and liberty, and offers us all an intimate relationship with himself in all of his ferocious grace.

Dr Krish Kandiah  is the president of London School of Theology , the largest interdenominational, evangelical theological college in Europe. He is also the founder of Home for Good , a start-up charity helping to find adoptive and foster homes for children in the care system.

Damaris Trust has produced resources  to help engage with the film.

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• REVIEW: Don’t Let Your People Go See <i>Exodus: Gods and Kings</i>

REVIEW: Don’t Let Your People Go See Exodus: Gods and Kings

“And this is your famous Uncle Moses,” a Hebrew man says to a child in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings . “He was once Prince of Egypt.” Renowned in movie history as in Bible history, Moses was indeed the star of the 1998 The Prince of Egypt , DreamWorks’ first animated feature, also known in the industry as The Zion King . In the 1980 comedy Wholly Moses! he was the upstart who swipes the Ten Commandments from Herschel, the would-be Hebrew hero played by Dudley Moore. Most memorably, Moses was Charlton Heston of the sturdy torso and stentorian voice in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments , released in 1956 and still, in terms of tickets sold, sixth among all-time box-office hits .

In Exodus: Gods and Kings, famous Uncle Moses is Christian Bale — also a looker, but employing an accent that wanders like the nomadic Jews from stately Brit-speak to American Urban-Tough. The movie got swathed in controversy during pre-production when certain groups complained that white actors had been cast as the Egyptians and Hebrews, anyway the Semites, of 1300 B.C. The director’s retort was brusque and businesslike. “I can’t mount a film of this budget [$130 million, plus about $70 million in tax rebates], and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such,” he told Variety . “I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.” Somehow this assertion that no Islamic performer would be a significant lure — plus the casting of an actor named Christian as the Jewish prophet who leads his people out of 400 years of Egyptian slavery — didn’t calm the protesters.

Racial sensitivities aside, this Exodus is a stolid mess, bleakly laughable without being an entertaining hoot like De Mille’s camp classic. On the plus side there are some vividly depicted plagues — alligators turning the Nile red, locusts, hailstones, a toad torrent (the frog of war), boils for the soulless, helpless Egyptians — and, in the parting of the Red Sea, the snazziest “enormous wall of water” since… well, since Interstellar last month. On the minus side is everything else.

MORE: Exodus and the True History of Moses

Working from a script by Steven Zaillian (an Oscar-winner for Schindler’s List ) and three lesser scribes, plus possibly a few uncredited Pharisees, Scott presents Moses as a wise warrior, hunky dude and favorite of the Pharaoh Seti (John Turturro). Seti’s son Ramses (Joel Edgerton) is an envious coward who boasts of achieving the military triumphs actually earned by Moses. In Ramses we have the standard friend-rival figure who hounds the lower-born hero, as seen in Biblical and Roman movie epics from The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur (Heston and Stephen Boyd) to Scott’s own Gladiator , where Russell Crowe is the solider soldier and Joaquin Phoenix the Emperor’s sicko son.

Scott’s royal Egyptians — Seti, Ramses and the Queen Mum Tuya (Sigourney Weaver) — are, in a way, colored. They’re golden, as if they’d rolled around in the largesse of Smaug’s cave and emerged as six-foot versions of the Oscar statuettes this movie will not be receiving. (According to Edgerton, he was also obliged to wear “ gold underpants .”) A few actors from sub-Saharan Africa play minor roles, but only as slaves — another nettle for prickly reviewers . At least Wholly Moses! , a Life of Brian -esque parody of the Bible, had the racial grace to cast Richard Pryor at the Pharaoh.

Buff and buttery, with a sideline in snake-wrestling, Ramses sports heavier makeup than a Real Housewife of Memphis, or Lipsinka . He and his family swan around the palace, rolling their blue eyes and signaling almost as much homoeroticism as you’d find in a Seth Rogen bromance. Ben Mendelsohn, as Viceroy Hegep, is a fruit salad of gay mannerisms and Jewish jibes. (He calls the Israelites “a conniving, combative people,” adding, “And I thought you people were supposed to be such good storytellers.”) The one performer having ostensible fun with his role, Mendelsohn may also be the only one who watched the De Mille film and took his cue from Yul Brynner’s preening Pharaoh.

Ten Actors Who Have Played God (In Film)

All this might be news to Scott, whose cinematic gifts are for marshaling strong images around dead-serious stories and not for sly satire with a feygele touch. Perhaps he means to portray the decadence of the Egyptian hierarchy, or of any family long in power. But most directors would try to give the imperial bad guys a little majesty, so the hero’s victory over them might have something to savor. The royals here are just fops who, with or without Moses, might have died out on their own, of inbreeding or ennui.

Stinting on the Moses backstory — of being set afloat by his mother for discovery by Pharaoh’s daughter — Scott first presents him as an outsider adopted by the Egyptian court. In an ancient variation on the famous Saturday Night Live “Jew, Not a Jew” sketch , Moses is an adult before becoming fully aware of his Hebrew heritage. When Ramses learns that his military better is a foreign slave, he banishes Moses. In the wild, the outcast builds a family, meets his God and fulfills his destiny.

MORE: How Ridley Scott’s Exodus Strays From the Bible

In another case of foot-in-mouth disease, Scott called religion “ the biggest source of evil ” — maybe not the most judicious way to promote an expensive movie that relies on the support of fundamentalist Christian audiences. He promised that his skepticism would make him the ideal fellow to tell a Bible story, because he’d first have to convince himself of its dramatic plausibility. That approach worked for Darren Aronofsky, the director of Noah earlier this year; he turned that Genesis tale into a climate-change parable of spiraling ambition and hallucinogenic wonder.

Not so for Scott, whose only risky choice was to make the Old Testament deity an 11-year-old boy (Isaac Andrews) with a balky disposition. He’s not genteel but a Gentile — a boy-God with a Goy bod — whose plan to free the Jews is to rain plagues on the Egyptians. Moses isn’t convinced. “From an economic standpoint, what you’re saying is problematic, to say the least,” he says, in clunkily verbose contrast to the God-child’s Pinteresque conciseness. When Moses asks, “Who are you?”, He replies simply, “I am,” which is arguably an improvement on the King James translation (“I am that I am”) or the Basic English Bible’s “I am what I am.” Popeye said that too.

He Who Is sets about tormenting the Jews’ tormentors, capped with the slaughter of every Egyptian first-born male — the event that Passover celebrates — while famous Uncle Moses leads his people through the CGI miracle of a parted Red Sea. The sequence is technologically impressive but, like everything else in Exodus: Gods and Kings , it lacks passion. Most secular audiences don’t care whether a movie like this is canonically faithful or a libel on the Bible. It also shouldn’t matter whether the director of such a film is Jewish, Christian or agnostic. But he has to believe in something, if only in his hero’s commitment to a quest or the thrill of Almighty spectacle. Otherwise, it’s not an epic; it’s just a waste of time and effort.

The movie’s sole genuine emotion comes at the very end, with the director’s dedication “For my brother, Tony Scott.” The younger Tony, who committed suicide in 2012 , was known for highly sexualized, very American modern melodramas such as Top Gun and True Romance . Ridley usually took the loftier road of period epics like The Duellists , Kingdom of Heaven and of course Gladiator , which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2001. “Nobody does toga movies like my brother,” Tony said.

Tony Scott didn’t live long enough to see Ridley’s kaftan movie, or to ask him the question that hangs over the full 150 mins. of this stillborn epic: If you don’t have something new to say or show, why make it?

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• DVD & Streaming

Exodus: Gods and Kings

• Action/Adventure , Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 12, 2014
• Christian Bale as Moses; Joel Edgerton as Ramses; Aaron Paul as Joshua; John Turturro as Seti; Maria Valverde as Zipporah; Isaac Andrews as Malak; Ben Kingsley as Nun, Sigourney Weaver as Tuya

Home Release Date

• March 17, 2015
• Ridley Scott

Distributor

• 20th Century Fox

Movie Review

The gods? Pish. Moses can do without ’em.

In the ancient Egypt reconstructed here by famed film director Ridley Scott—where rivers, rocks and rising suns all have their own personal deities, where the pharaoh Seti scrutinizes animal organs for omens—Moses puts his faith in himself and his own strong right arm. As one of Seti’s most trusted generals, he knows full well the challenges facing this riverfront empire: Neither Amun nor Osiris nor any other deity is going to save the Egyptian people from the Hittites. Moses and his princely stepbrother, Ramses, at the front of the Egyptian army, stand a better chance of protecting the kingdom than a handful of goose guts.

So when a priestess uncovers an omen in some entrails—that in an upcoming battle a leader will be saved, and the savior will lead—Moses shrugs it off. And even when he does rescue Ramses from impending doom, he takes pains to minimize it. Prophecy, schmophecy.

Not Ramses, though. Even though the prince loves Moses like the brother he grows up to be, the foretelling now makes him a foe. And when Ramses hears rumors that Moses might not be Egyptian at all—that he could be, of all things, a Hebrew , one of those who were enslaved by the Egyptians 400 years earlier—Ramses knows that Moses will have to go.

Ridley’s Ramses exiles Moses to the wastelands beyond the Nile, where Moses eventually finds Jethro and his fair daughters in the land of Midian. There, he finds a wife (Zipporah), a new life (as a shepherd) … and a new God to deal with. Moses’ own son points to a mountain and tells him that it’s sacred. “God’s mountain,” he says. And when Moses hesitates to accept, Zipporah chastises him for confusing the child.

“Is it good for a boy to grow up believing in nothing?” She asks him.

“Is it bad to grow up believing in yourself?” Moses retorts.

But when a few sheep scamper up this sacred hill and Moses runs after them, something happens to shake his agnosticism. He gets knocked around and knocked out by a landslide. And when he comes to, he sees a burning bush. Beside it, a child—a child who talks as no child should.

“Who are you?” Moses asks.

“I Am,” the child tells him.

Moses told himself that he wanted nothing to do with all those gods. But it seems that God may want something to do with him.

Positive Elements

Exodus: Gods and Kings is, of course, based (sometimes quite loosely) on the biblical book of Exodus. It’s the foundational journal of the Jews in many respects, and a broadly inspirational one as well—a story of a people striving for freedom. Some of that shines through in this screenplay.

At first, Moses is a reluctant shepherd for his people. For much of the movie, he sees himself as Egyptian. He hates the idea of leaving his wife and son behind when he goes back to Egypt to retrieve his Hebrews. But go he does—demanding freedom for a people he barely knows from a government he actually quite likes. Even as God spares His people from most of the plagues, Moses suffers. We see it in his face when he hears the Egyptians grieve over their lost children, hear it in his voice when he speaks to Ramses. He’s not a prophet without a heart … but he is one who’s determined to see his job through to the end.

We see a great deal of strength in the Hebrew people as well. They’ve waited a very long time for their deliverance, and they’re willing to sacrifice a great deal to see it through. Miriam, Moses’ sister, refuses to fess up about Moses’ secret lineage, for instance, and she nearly has her hand chopped off for her trouble. (Moses winds up saving her—admitting to being Hebrew even if he doesn’t yet believe it himself.) And when Moses returns from exile and hides among the Hebrews, they refuse to give him up—even as Ramses hangs whole families to “encourage” informants.

Ramses, though, is not without virtue. As a prince, he clearly loved Moses. As king, he exiles Moses instead of executing him, and even arranges for him to keep his sword. Ramses also dearly loves his son, cradling him and doting on him in life. He’s nearly torn asunder by grief when the boy dies.

Spiritual Elements

God is obviously a big part of the Exodus story. And while Ridley Scott doesn’t make Him central here, to both his credit and detriment the director does give Him screen time.

The mysterious boy Moses talks to by the burning bush is called (in the credits) Malak, a Semitic word for angel . And Moses himself calls the child a messenger at one point. But he clearly represents someone much, much bigger. He either is God or he speaks directly for Him, calling Moses to his sacred work and triggering the plagues as well. This God is powerful … but is shown to act like a petulant, willful child. Ramses is horrified that the Hebrews would worship a God who kills children, and Moses expresses his own moments of doubt and horror too.

Because of all that, it’s easy to see a tinge of the Gnostic concept of the Demiurge at play in this lad who would be God. (Gnosticism encompasses multiple heretical deviations from Christianity. Tendrils of it hold that the Bible is really the story of two gods—one the essentially unknowable and most-high God of the New Testament, and the other a lesser, more vindictive god of the Old Testament.)

Scott also leaves open the possibility that God is a figment of Moses’ imagination—a hallucination brought on by the rock that hit his head. No one but Moses can see Him, of course. And when the plagues are in full force, Ramses’ advisors suggest they might all be the result of naturalistic causes. Even the parting of the Red Sea feels more like a weird-but-still-natural anomaly, especially at first, than a supernatural event.

Elsewhere, a priestess cuts open a bird and scans its entrails for a sign. She appeals to her gods to cleanse the blood-red Nile to no avail. She mentions petitioning a number of gods for relief. Seti is obsessed with supernatural signs. And Ramses, who initially shares Moses’ skepticism, prays to idols, touching them tentatively. A rendition of a battle insists that he was saved “only through the help of the gods.” We see a golden calf idol at a distance.

Sexual Content

Moses and Zipporah get married. Once alone, they kiss, exchange sweet nothings and Zipporah invites him to “proceed.” He takes off only her veil before the camera retreats. We see the same sort of scene essentially repeated many years later. A woman wears a tummy-baring top.

Violent Content

Battles. Plagues. Drownings. This movie suffers from its share of death and destruction.

Egypt’s horrors open with a plague of crocodiles who bloodily chomp on several fishermen and one another as well, turning the water red (by way of blood and, according to the pharaoh’s naturalistic explanation, stirring the Nile’s red silt). This affliction results in lots and lots of dead fish. Frogs and flies follow. (We see a screaming man suck in a mouthful of flies.) People get hit with huge (but not flaming) hailstones. Then Egyptians are covered in ooky sores. (Servants remove a bloody bandage from the queen’s back.) Animals die, with more blood spilling. The final plague is not so flashy, but it’s deeply chilling: We watch children breathe deeply in their sound sleep and then, suddenly, stop—their corpses cradled by grieving parents.

On the battle field, men are killed via sword, ax and arrow. Hundreds of soldiers, horses and chariots grotesquely tumble down a mountain as the pass crumbles beneath them. A man is gruesomely run over by a chariot. Flaming arrows find their way to fishing vessels, setting them and the people inside on fire. People are dragged out of their homes, beaten, whipped and hanged (or otherwise slaughtered). Buildings and vineyards are burned.

The sea comes crashing down on the bulk of the Egyptian army, drowning nearly everyone.

Moses kills a Hebrew overseer, seriously wounds another and stabs two would-be assassins. He himself is hit in the head with a rock, and his leg boasts a nasty, bloody fracture.

The Hebrews paint their door frames with the blood of sacrificed lambs.

Crude or Profane Language

Drug and alcohol content.

Ramses milks venom from a cobra, apparently with the intention of drinking it. “A little venom in your blood is a good thing,” he tells Moses. “Makes you less vulnerable to the next poisonous bite.” Ramses seems to be a bit inebriated when he nearly chops off someone’s hand. Moses takes a sip, too.

After Moses has his first meeting with God, Zipporah—a woman of deep faith—tells him he’s imagining things.

“How do you know?” Moses asks.

“Because God is not a boy.”

This short sequence takes place 1,300 years before the birth of Jesus—when God, obviously, became a boy. That comparison won’t lessen the troublesomeness of seeing the Great I Am cast as 11-year-old Isaac Andrews.

But it’s not how God looks that’s the most troubling thing: It’s how He acts in Exodus: Gods and Kings .

In fairness, the original Exodus story is challenging to our modern and postmodern sensibilities of equality and human rights. It’s undeniably hard to read about the killing of Egypt’s first born and not feel a twinge of grief. But Scott’s God approaches the plagues with either the dispassion of a grim accountant or the anger of a boy who feels wronged. There’s no hint of sadness or love. And because Scott chose to portray Him as a boy, moviegoers may want to respond by sending the tyke to a timeout.

Which, given Scott’s outspoken anti-religion leanings, might be exactly what the director had in mind.

“The biggest source of evil is of course religion,” he told Esquire in 2012. When the interviewer pressed him on the point, Scott said, “Can you think of a good one? A just and kind and tolerant religion?”

Not in this movie.

Is the God Scott gives us “the God of compassion and mercy”? Rarely. “Slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness”? Hardly. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the plot-point deviations Scott’s Exodus takes when compared to the original text. Moses? Well, he’s far more tortured terrorist than booming Charlton Heston here. Actor Christian Bale said of his character, “I think the man was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life. … He was a very troubled, tumultuous man and mercurial. But the biggest surprise was the nature of God. He was equally very mercurial.”

Not everything takes the first exit ramp off the scriptural account, though. And the resulting combination of fact and artistic license can create some pretty robust conversations about what the Bible really does say about Moses and his mission of liberation. It’s an optimistic view that’s bolstered by us seeing that the shed blood of the Passover lamb—a foreshadowing of Christ’s awesome work on the cross so many centuries later—still protects the Israelites in this tale. And Moses does indeed begin his own personal transformation when he’s called, and he does indeed fulfill God’s directive on his life, whether he really wants to or not.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Exodus: Gods And Kings Review

26 Dec 2014

150 minutes

Exodus: Gods And Kings

The Bible shows us God can talk through killing or through allowing his son to be killed. It’s the weird, confusing and sometimes wonderful contrast between the Old and New Testaments. The achievement of Ridley Scott’s take on the most famous story of exile, imprisonment and escape is not that it solves that apparent contradiction – that would be a miracle – but that it lives in it. This is a film that poses more questions than it answers. Where does faith become fanaticism? When does freedom fighting become terrorism? Why does God work through people, or people pretend to be Gods? All that, and shit gets blown up. Well, okay, not quite: people are devoured, sliced and starved in wide-screen spectacle. Oh and, yes – spoiler alert, if you didn’t pay attention in Sunday School – children are killed in their sleep.

Scott has DeMillions to mount the ten plagues and eclipses Cecil’s Ten Commandments with aplomb and invention. The script by Adam Cooper & Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian brightly attempts to rationalise the horrors that befall the Egyptian people, before leading us along with Moses to realise the answer may be in how God identifies himself: “I Am”.

If you ignore the scale, splendour and slaughter – for a moment – then the biblical pic this bears most comparison to is not those afternoon-long ’50s costume parties, but The Last Temptation Of Christ. Like Scorsese’s heartfelt, fascinating film – too readily dismissed by some Christians as heretical – Exodus: Gods And Kings has a lead who’s not sure if he’s the messiah or just a very naughty boy. Is he mad or bad or from God? Bale, here, is perfect casting, at war with himself as much as he is with Egypt. You feel that tension throughout his performance and throughout the film. It’s a Bible epic that isn’t sure that God exists, and isn’t sure he’s benevolent. But it is also a film that wants, in its heart, to believe.

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Exodus: Gods And Kings (2014) Review

Biblical epic reimagined.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

Last spring, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah provided a deeply bizarre (some would even say blasphemous) blockbuster take on a popular biblical tale, and now to help wrap up the year, Ridley Scott has provided his own somewhat similar spin on another in Exodus: Gods And Kings . If you’ve seen Gladiator , then it’s pretty easy to guess what interested Scott in mounting a biblical epic for contemporary audiences. Indeed the movie is just as massive, violent, and easy on the eyes as you’d expect. What comes as an unexpected treat is the fact that Scott also had a fairly spiritually ambiguous take on potentially evangelical material. There’s quite a bit to admire about the film. Unfortunately, that’s not the same thing as saying that the film is an complete success. Scott might be a master at mounting massive production, but his skills as a storyteller have never quite matched his technical gifts. So, it’s an interesting holiday blockbuster for sure, just not quite the masterpiece that he was so clearly striving for.

The story is pretty familiar for those who have read the book (the Bible), although it has been tweaked for the film in a way that might displease the ravenous fans of the source material. So, Moses (Christian Bale) is a successful military leader in ancient Egypt whose has been best buds with the prince Rhamses (Joel Edgerton) since childhood, giving him the ear of the pharaoh (John Turturro). When Rhamses takes power, his long held jealousy of Moses becomes a problem. Once Rhamses hears that Moses is secretly Jewish and adopted, he banishes his former buddy from the kingdom. While in exile Moses forms a family and starts a new life that dismisses his Jewish heritage and the prophecy he was told by an elder (Ben Kingsley) that he is destined to lead the enslaved Jewish race into freedom. Then one day Moses has a dream with a burning bush and a child and is convinced that he has seen God and must accept his fate. He leads the Jews in acts of violent rebellion for a while. Then once that seems to be a fruitless cry for freedom , he prays extra hard and a series of plagues beset the kingdom. During all of the trouble, Moses leads the Jews out to the desert where the Red Sea must be parted to cement their escape. This being a Ridley Scott flick, there’s also a battle sequence in the parted Red Sea. Other than that, it’s fairly close to the original text aside from some welcome ambiguity.

First and foremost, there’s no denying that Exodus is a wondrous work of pure cinematic spectacle. Ridley Scott has some big shoes to fill in trying to match the old timey Hollywood biblical epics in sheer scale and beauty, but he does so admirably. The sets are huge, while the props and costumes are ridiculously ornate to the point of unintentional hilarity. Scott also uses CGI to enhance his scale and delivers some pretty stunning set pieces in the process (especially during the various plagues). His battle scenes are rough and bloody like Gladiator and they deliver the requisite thrills. Yet despite all of the glorious eye-candy and hash action scenes on display, the most interesting aspect of Scott’s Exodus is the filmmaker’s surprisingly ambiguous take on the material. All the right pieces are in place for those looking to take the story literally to be satisfied. But, Scott also cleverly stages and designs all of the scenes involving God so that they could be just as easily read as hallucination and insanity. This Moses is hardly a pure saint, he’s clearly unhinged and uncertain of his power and fate. The brutality of the plagues is also openly used to question acts of God. Though the movie will probably please the Sunday School crowd, it’s nice and a little subversive that Scott also ensured that anyone who questions such things will have plenty of food for thought as well (especially in such a massive Hollywood production).

Scott has an ideal sparring partner in Christian Bale as Moses. No stranger to playing mentally unbalanced and morally ambiguous characters (you might even call it his specialty), Bale ensures that his Moses is complex, mysterious, and a little nutty. It’s an impressively grounded performance that contrasts awkwardly against the rest of the all-star cast who are mugging and overacting like an old Hollywood epic. Maybe that was a deliberate stylistic choice, but more likely than not it was a result of Scott’s typical weaknesses as a filmmaker which are all on full display here. As usual, much of the acting is stiff, any dialogue scene is a pain to get through due to Scott’s indifference for such matters, and the choppy narrative flow suggests that an overlong movie was viciously chopped down to even hit a butt-numbing 150 minute running time (there will inevitably be a director’s cut Blu-ray that will play smoother even though it won’t necessarily be a better movie). So, Exodus is a deeply flawed film to say the least. But at least it’s a Biblical epic that dares to thoughtfully explore and question its subject matter rather than merely pander to the Christian masses. Had the movie not come out after Noah, it might even feel brilliant. Unfortunately, this has been done better before rather recently, and suffers from comparison. Still, Exodus is a far better and more complex movie than it had any right to be, even if it’s far from perfect.

Final Thoughts

Phil Brown is a film critic, comedy writer, and filmmaker who can be found haunting theaters and video stores throughout Toronto.

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Exodus: Gods and Kings

• The defiant leader Moses rises up against Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, setting six hundred thousand slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt and its terrifying cycle of deadly plagues.
• Biblical epic 'Exodus: Gods and Kings' stars Christian Bale as Moses who, as the film opens, fights alongside his brother Ramses (a shaved-headed Joel Edgerton), to help defend Egypt, which is ruled by their father Seti (John Turturro). During battle, Moses saves Ramses' life, causing Ramses to fear that his brother will one day be King because it fits with a prophecy handed down by one of Seti's trusted spiritualists. Soon after Seti's death, Moses, who is actually Jewish and not Egyptian, is banished. However, he becomes the leader of the Jewish people and leads a rebellion against the Egyptians, with help from a wrathful God.
• Raised together as brothers, capable leader Moses and Pharaoh Seti's egotistical biological son Ramses eventually find themselves engaged in a bitter rivalry when Ramses discovers Moses' Hebrew origin. However, when Egypt's new Pharaoh, Ramses II, banishes Moses to the unforgiving desert, God assigns him the difficult task of freeing 600,000 enslaved Israelites and taking them to safety. Against the backdrop of pitiless and calamitous plagues, Moses must do God's will and lead His long-suffering people across the Red Sea: the last but impregnable obstacle. Can Moses fulfill his destiny? — Nick Riganas
• Epic adventure 'Exodus: Gods and Kings' is the story of one man's daring courage to take on the might of an empire. Using state-of-the art visual effects and 3-D immersion, Ridley Scott brings new life to the story of defiant leader Moses as he rises up against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, setting 600,000 slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt and its terrible cycle of deadly plagues. — 20th Century Fox
• In the ancient tale of the Hebrews, Moses gathers the faith to free his 600,000 enslaved people from Egyptain rule. Pharaoh Ramses II, with whom he grew up, must face his once-best friend in a battle that exceeds the mere mortals, and endures the act of God.
• Ancient Egypt 1,300 B.C. The Hebrews have been slaves to Egypt for over 400 years. They have shaped and built the city under the rule of a series of Pharaohs. They have not forgotten their homeland or their one God, and 'He' has not forgotten them. In the Pharaoh's temple in the holy city of Memphis, Moses (Christian Bale) and his adoptive brother Ramses (Joel Edgerton) learn that the Hittite army is near the city. The Pharaoh Seti (John Turturro) hears from the High Priestess (Indira Varma) of a prophecy that states that one will become a leader. Together, the two brothers ride their chariots into battle. With their own army, they confront the Hittites and take them down. Ramses is nearly killed when his chariot breaks down and he is nearly trampled, but Moses hurls a spear that breaks the Hittite chariot. Seti later thanks Moses for saving Ramses. Moses is sent to meet with Viceroy Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn), who oversees the slaves in the city. While they are walking, Moses sees one slave, Joshua (Aaron Paul), being whipped. This image horrifies him. Moses also meets a tribe of Hebrews led by Joshua's father Nun (Ben Kingsley). Here, Moses learns that he is also a Hebrew and was sent to Egypt as a baby. Moses is upset by this revelation. Two Hebrews hear the story and report it to Hegep. Some time later, Seti dies and Ramses is made the new Pharaoh. He learns of Moses' lineage from Hegep. A servant named Miriam (Tara Fitzgerald) is brought before him for interrogation at the behest of Queen Tuya (Sigourney Weaver). Ramses questions if she is Moses' sister. He nearly cuts off her arm until Moses intervenes and says she is his sister. Tuya wants Moses to be executed, but Ramses sends him into exile. Before leaving, Moses meets Miriam and their birth mother, who tell him his birth name is Moishe. Moses travels through the desert and comes across Midian and settles there. He meets Jethro (Kevork Malikyan) and his daughter Zipporah (Maria Valverde). Over time, Moses becomes a shepherd and comes to know Zipporah and they eventually fall in love and marry. Nine years later, Ramses continues to rule over Egypt with power. He has married Nefertari (Golshifeth Farahani) and has an infant son. Moses has also stayed in Midian and had a son with Zipporah named Gershom (Hal Hewetson). Moses has not shared the same faith in God that his wife and child had, which upsets Zipporah. Moses takes a trip up a mountain during a storm. A rock slide occurs in which he gets knocked unconscious and has his leg broken. He awakens nearly completely submerged in mud. He hears a voice and sees a burning bush. A child named Malak (Isaac Andrews) comes before him. He is a representation of God sent to speak with Moses. The boy takes some stones and stacks them together to form a pyramid to remind Moses of what he must do and who his people are. Moses returns to the village and has his leg treated. He tells Zipporah what he saw and what he heard. She doesn't believe that God would have come to him as a child. Moses knows he has a task to do, but Zipporah doesn't want him to leave his family behind. Moses returns to Egypt and reunites with Nun and Joshua. He also meets his brother Aaron (Andrew Tarbet) for the first time, along with Aaron's own son. Moses returns to the temple and confronts Ramses with a sword to the neck. Ramses is shocked to see Moses still alive. Moses tells Ramses of his mission from God. Afterwards, Ramses decides he wants Moses dead, and so he hunts down the Hebrews in the city and begins to publicly execute them until Moses turns himself in. Moses gathers the Hebrews and trains them in combat against Ramses' forces. Together with the tribesmen, they learn how to utilize bows and arrows as well as defenses against the Egyptians. Meanwhile, Moses continues to communicate with Malak, who warns him of something to come. The chaos begins when a group of crocodiles attacks a boat of fishermen. The beasts rip them apart (as well as each other), leaving the sea red with blood. The Ten Plagues then hit Egypt, beginning with all the water in the city turning to blood, with dead sea creatures surfacing. From the water come hundreds and hundreds of frogs all over the city. This is followed by a massive swarm of lice going all across the land. The Egyptians, including Ramses and his family, get rashes and boils on their skin. Ramses consults his grand vizier and the High Priestess for help, but when they provide him with no results, he has them executed. Moses confronts Ramses again about releasing the Hebrews. Ramses argues that there is no reason to change this after 400 years, as it would also be bad for Egypt economically as the country relies heavily on slave labor. Thus, the plagues continue with pestilence overtaking the livestock. They cough up blood before dying all over the place. Then a huge swarm of locusts overtakes the city, destroying much of the crops. A powerful hail storm follows, also causing much destruction in the city. Joshua comes across Moses talking to Malak, though Joshua cannot see the boy. Moses is horrified to learn of what the final plague is to be. He tells the Hebrews to slaughter a lamb and cover their doors with blood. That night, a darkness sweeps over the city. The first born child in each Egyptian home that is not marked with blood dies, including the son of Ramses. He finds his dead child and wails. After this, Ramses angrily tells Moses to leave with the Hebrews for Canaan. Moses leads the Hebrews into their exodus from the city. They walk for days until coming across the Red Sea. Fearing they have no way of going further, a frustrated Moses throws his sword into the ocean. Later, the waters begin to recede, allowing the people to go through. One Hebrew objects to Moses' leadership, but Moses convinces everyone to continue following him as he vows to take them home. They begin to walk through the sea. Back in Egypt, Ramses is still mourning the loss of his son. He decides to go after the Hebrews. His men ride through the mountains without stopping to rest the men or horses. On their journey, a large portion of Ramses' soldiers are killed when the mountains break down and take the soldiers down with it. The surviving Egyptians catch up to the Hebrews, who are almost through the Red Sea. The waters then begin to reform, forcing everyone to run for it. Moses rides toward Ramses, while Joshua, Aaron, and others follow him. As the waters get higher and closer, Moses orders the Hebrews to run back to land, while most of Ramses' soldiers retreat, even as Ramses continues riding toward Moses. The waves then crash down, killing Ramses' men before hitting both Moses and Ramses. Moses survives and rejoins the Hebrews, while Ramses also survives but is left alone amongst his dead soldiers, all of whom are being feasted on by the birds. Moses leads the Hebrews through Midian so that he may reunite with Zipporah and Gershom. Moses tells her that her faith should be stronger than ever now. They embrace and kiss. Later on, Moses is carving out the Ten Commandments onto a slab of stone. He talks to Malak again, who tells him that if he truly believes in what he's writing, that he ought to continue. The Hebrews make their way through Mount Sinai. A significantly older Moses rides with the Ten Commandments close to him. He looks out and sees Malak amongst the crowd before he seems to disappear. The Hebrews then continue making their way to the promised land.

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The Highest-Grossing Christian Bale Movies, Ranked

Quick links, public enemies (2009), ford v ferrari (2019), american hustle (2013), exodus: gods and kings (2014), pocahontas (1995), batman begins (2005), terminator salvation (2009), thor: love and thunder (2022), the dark knight (2008), the dark knight rises (2012).

• Christian Bale starred in several top-grossing films, including Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, each surpassing $375 million.
• Bale's performances showcase depth, transforming physically for roles and embodying complex characters.
• Despite mixed reviews, Thor: Love And Thunder, with Bale as a villain, still grossed over $760 million worldwide.

Christian Bale is one of Hollywood's most versatile actors, renowned for his ability to disappear into a wide range of roles.

Bale had his breakthrough role at age 13 in Steven Spielberg 's 1987 war film Empire Of The Sun.

He gained wider recognition for his performance as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and in the title role in The Machinist.

In 2005, he played the superhero Batman in Batman Begins, reprising the role in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, earning deserved acclaim for his performance in the trilogy.

In 2014, Forbes magazine ranked Bale as one of the highest-paid actors . Today, Christian Bale has an estimated net worth of $120 million.

Over the past three decades, the Academy Award winner has starred in over 50 films, grossing over $6.59 billion worldwide.

Let's take a look at the ten highest-grossing Christian Bale movies.

Batman Begins: The Christian Bale Route To $120 Million

Global box office, public enemies - $214,104,620.

Michael Mann 's Public Enemies brings Bryan Burrough's 2004 non-fiction book to the big screen, vividly depicting the FBI's efforts to capture notorious bank robber John Dillinger .

Christian Bale takes on the role of FBI agent Melvin Purvis, who is tasked with capturing Johnny Depp 's Dillinger.

To prepare for the role, Bale reportedly immersed himself in historical research and trained with real FBI agents, to accurately depict the methods used during that era.

Public Enemies is noted for its meticulous attention to detail, from the costumes and settings to the historical accuracy of its plot.

Mann insisted on filming at actual locations associated with Dillinger, adding a layer of authenticity that enhances the viewing experience.

Public Enemies grossed $97.1 million domestically, with a worldwide gross of $214.1 million against its production budget of $100 million.

Global Box Office, Ford v Ferrari - $225,508,210

Ford v Ferrari races through the heart of 1960s motorsport history, capturing the intense rivalry that drove Ford to challenge Ferrari's dominance at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Christian Bale stars in this sports drama as British race car driver Ken Miles, who, along with automotive designer Carroll Shelby ( Matt Damon ), takes on the seemingly impossible task of building a car for Ford to beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966.

Bale's charismatic and profoundly human performance highlights his versatility as an actor. Bale underwent a remarkable physical transformation, shedding pounds to embody Miles' lean physique.

The film's racing scenes and the palpable camaraderie between Bale and Damon ignite the screen and leave audiences on the edge of their seats.

Ford v Ferrari excelled at the box office, grossing $117.6 million in North America and $107.9 million internationally, for a worldwide total of $225.5 million on a production budget of $97 million.

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Global box office, american hustle - $251,171,807.

American Hustle was an unsettling tale of deception and redemption set against the backdrop of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Directed by David O. Russell , the film dives into the colorful world of cons and comebacks, where the line between the con artist and the conned is perilously thin.

Christian Bale stars as Irving Rosenfeld, a brilliantly cunning con man whose complex schemes are as layered as his own life.

Bale underwent a remarkable physical transformation for his role, gaining 40 pounds and adopting a risky comb-over, paired with a posture that speaks volumes of his character's burdens and chameleon-like adaptability.

This role challenged Bale physically and demonstrated his ability to embody deeply flawed yet oddly charismatic characters, earning him widespread acclaim and an Oscar nomination for "Best Actor."

The film struck gold at the box office, pulling in $150.1 million in North America and $101.1 million internationally, rounding up to a global total of $251.2 million .

American Hustle made a net profit of $27 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues for the film.

Global Box Office, Exodus: Gods And Kings - $268,175,631

Ridley Scott 's Exodus: Gods And Kings presents a visually stunning re-imagining of the biblical tale of Moses.

Christian Bale steps into the sandals of Moses, the storied Hebrew prophet who rises against his adoptive brother Ramses to lead his people out of Egyptian bondage.

With its sweeping landscapes and massive scale, the film attempts to capture the essence of an ancient struggle through state-of-the-art visual effects and meticulous production design.

The film's grandeur and scope and Bale's gravitas make for a fascinating, if not entirely uncontroversial, final product.

Critics praised the visual effects and cast performances but criticized its pacing, screenplay, lack of emotional heft, and inaccuracy of the source material.

Exodus: Gods And Kings topped the box office during its opening weekend with $24.1 million .

It went on to gross $65 million in the U.S. and Canada and $203 million in other territories, for a total of $268.2 million worldwide.

Ranking The Highest-Grossing Animated Disney Movies Of All Time

Global box office, pocahontas - $346,079,773.

Disney's Pocahontas is an animated classic that narrates a romanticized tale of a legendary Native American figure and her encounter with English settler John Smith.

Christian Bale lends his voice to the character Thomas, a young settler and friend of John Smith. Pocahontas was Disney's first animated feature based on a historical figure, albeit with considerable artistic license.

The movie faced criticism for its historical inaccuracies and creative liberties, sparking debates about its portrayal of real events and cultural representation.

Like many of Disney's animated classics from the 1990s, Pocahontas was a box office hit. The film had a budget of $55 million , typical for animated films of that era.

It nearly septupled its budget, earning $141.5 million in North America and $205.5 million internationally, for a total global gross of $346 million.

Global Box Office, Batman Begins - $375,325,692

Batman Begins revolutionized the superhero genre with its grounded, dark, and realistic portrayal of the Caped Crusader.

This film revitalized the Batman franchise and set a new standard for film reboots, influencing numerous other series, including James Bond, to adopt a more serious and realistic tone.

Christian Bale's portrayal of Bruce Wayne , a tormented billionaire driven to become a vigilante, is intense and introspective, perfectly capturing the psychological depth of a character grappling with deep personal trauma.

Bale's commitment to the role involved rigorous physical training and a deep dive into the character's psyche, which helped make his Batman a figure both feared and revered.

Though initially met with skepticism, his unique, now-iconic, gravelly voice has become a definitive aspect of his portrayal.

At the box office, Batman Begins grossed $205 million in North America, and reached a global total of $375 million .

While it was not the top earner of 2005 right out of the gate, its impact ensured the launch of two highly successful sequels.

Batman, Spider-Man, And The Highest-Grossing Michael Keaton Movies

Global box office, terminator salvation - $371,353,001.

Terminator Salvation sought to rejuvenate the iconic franchise by plunging viewers into the apocalyptic future previously only hinted at in earlier films.

In this fourth installment, Christian Bale steps into the role of John Connor, the prophesied leader of the human resistance against Skynet's robotic onslaught.

The film ambitiously sets the stage for the events that would lead to the franchise's time-traveling narratives, and Christian Bale brings a relentless intensity to Connor, portraying him as a battle-hardened soldier and a strategic thinker with a deep emotional core.

His performance is rich in both action prowess and psychological depth.

Despite these efforts, the film diverges from the franchise's traditional focus on a singular, unstoppable threat, opting for a broader, more explosive depiction of the conflict.

According to Box Office Mojo, Terminator Salvation grossed $125 million in North America and $246 million from overseas territories, for a worldwide gross of $371 million.

Global Box Office, Thor: Love And Thunder - $760,928,081

In Thor: Love And Thunder , Christian Bale makes a dramatic return to superhero cinema, stepping into the role of the menacing antagonist Gorr, The God Butcher, a stark departure from his previous heroic portrayal of Batman.

Bale's Gorr is a complex villain, driven by deep-seated grief and a haunting desire for vengeance against the gods, making him a captivating figure of darkness in the otherwise humor-laden film:

Following the critically acclaimed Thor: Ragnarök, the film was met with immense anticipation.

Despite facing mixed reviews from audiences who found the tonal shifts jarring, it performed robustly at the box office.

Thor: Love And Thunder grossed $343.3 million in the United States and Canada and $417.7 million in other territories, for a total of $760.9 million worldwide .

According to Deadline Hollywood, the film's net profit was $103 million , factoring in production costs and box office revenues.

Chris Hemsworth's Net Worth: How Thor Earns And Spends His $130 Million Fortune

Global box office, the dark knight - $1,008,497,140.

Considered a masterpiece – not only among Batman films, but in superhero cinema as a whole – Christopher Nolan 's The Dark Knight has inspired endless discussion and analysis.

Despite Christian Bale's Batman often being overshadowed by Heath Ledger 's Joker, the film's exceptional quality ensures it remains compelling from start to finish.

As the Joker's reign of chaos escalates, Bale's Batman grapples with vengeance, loss, and the ever-blurring lines between heroism and vigilantism.

Their electrifying on-screen chemistry is the driving force behind this modern classic, which led the film to a riotous performance at the box office.

Bale received a $10 million base salary for The Dark Knight, and an additional $20 million performance bonus.

The Dark Knight grossed $535 million in North America and $473 million internationally, for a total of $1.008 billion worldwide , making it the first superhero film to surpass the $1 billion mark.

Global Box Office, The Dark Knight Rises - $1,085,289,416

The Dark Knight Rises delivered an emotionally satisfying conclusion to Nolan's trilogy.

Christian Bale donned the iconic cape and cowl for the last time, delivering a powerful finale to his portrayal of the caped crusader.

This installment introduces new adversaries and allies, including Tom Hardy 's formidable Bane and Anne Hathaway 's Catwoman.

Set eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the film follows Bruce Wayne as he comes out of retirement to save Gotham City from the brink of destruction.

Bale's portrayal of a physically and emotionally scarred Bruce Wayne weighed heavily on the audience. The film's intense action sequences, intricate plot, and character development make it a fitting end to the trilogy.

Bale earned $15 million for his final appearance as Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, and it is the highest-grossing Christian Bale movie to date.

The film earned $448.1 million in North America and $632.9 million in other countries, summing up to a worldwide total of $1.081 billion against a production budget of $250 million.

Breaking News

Police identify Steve Buscemi’s alleged attacker a week after ‘random act of violence’

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New York police are searching for a man they allege punched Emmy-winning actor Steve Buscemi in Manhattan last week.

Police named 50-year-old Clifton Williams as the suspect behind the alleged assault that left the “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Big Lebowski” star’s left eye bloodied and bruised, The Times confirmed Wednesday. Police responded last week to a report of an assault in Kips Bay involving Buscemi, 66, and a then-”unidentified individual.”

After the alleged assault, EMS brought Buscemi to Bellevue hospital for treatment. He was in stable condition but suffered “bruising, swelling and bleeding to his left eye,” according to a police report. Police said last week that the suspect was “a male with dark complexion” wearing a dark baseball hat, a blue T-shirt, black pants and white sneakers and carrying a bookbag.

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Michael Stuhlbarg previewed his Broadway show ‘Patriots’ on Monday, a day after a 27-year-old man allegedly threw a rock at the actor’s head in New York.

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Police have made no arrests in connection to the alleged assault and an investigation is ongoing.

Buscemi became the second “Boardwalk Empire” star assaulted in New York in two months. In April, his co-star Michael Stuhlbarg was “ randomly attacked near Central Park ” while he was out on a walk.

Police alleged that a 27-year-old man, whom they described as unhoused, hurled a rock at the 55-year-old Stuhlbarg’s head. Police arrested the alleged assaulter, who faces felony charges of assault in the second degree and harassment in the second degree.

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Stuhlbarg returned to Broadway a day after the incident in a preview performance of his new play, “Patriots.”

In a statement shared with The Times earlier this week, a representative for “Fargo” star Buscemi said he is on the mend after he became “another victim of a random act of violence in the city.”

“He is OK and appreciates everyone’s well wishes,” the statement added, “though incredibly sad for everyone that this has happened to while also walking the streets of NY.”

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Alexandra Del Rosario is an entertainment reporter on the Los Angeles Times Fast Break Desk. Before The Times, she was a television reporter at Deadline Hollywood, where she first served as an associate editor. She has written about a wide range of topics including TV ratings, casting and development, video games and AAPI representation. Del Rosario is a UCLA graduate and also worked at the Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap.

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