Critics reviews

In many ways, Exodus adhered to the formula that is being used across various 3D action blockbusters... Although formulaic, the depth fields that were constructed in this system were extensive and rich in detail, proving that Scott and his stereographic team have a good eye for how to use 3D technology in dynamic ways.

I don't expect all films set in ancient cultures to be 100% authentic in their design and their depiction of events. Considerations of spectacle and general visual appeal take precedence at times. But Exodus goes a bit over the top. Even a one-time tourist to Egypt who was paying the slightest attention to the guide would spot some laugh-out-loud moments here.

It's sad to say that the most interesting aspects of this film don't actually occur on the screen. There has been much rhubarbing about how, in an interview with Variety, Ridley Scott offered some rather unreconstructed commentary on the casting process of the film and the fact that all his lead players were white purely as a way to secure funding. This Partridge-like marketing snafu offers a thorny philosophical talking point which the film is sorely lacking.

Scott probably knows that Exodus was a bad idea. Not even the Red Sea — the object of The Ten Commandments' high point — parts with any conviction. Surely he can see that turning the Burning Bush into a blob of Sterno was a mistake. So was representing the Almighty as a vindictive English snot. These aren't plagues he unleashes so much as tantrums.

I was impressed at first. Not anymore." So says Moses, ungratefully, to God – and the same might be said of this long, tone-deaf version of the Moses story. It's impressive at first, at least as spectacle; but it falters as it goes, gets increasingly crass and insensitive, and ends up close to intolerable.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is as uneven as Ridley Scott's career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director's greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out; the bad news is all the awkward storytelling and botched character interactions we have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Once we do, though, Exodus is a hoot.

Every bit as fusty as Robin Hood, Ridley Scott's biblical epic takes two off-beat, more or less mutually exclusive interpretations of Exodus—God is a delusion motivated by Moses' latent guilt; God is real, but only helping the Jews because he wants to punish the Pharaohs for deifying themselves—and flattens them into 2.5 hours of digital mattes, CGI disasters, and scowling.

It's not just that Exodus: Gods and Kings is crafted as a biblical epic for a secular age. That would be too simplistic a charge to lob at it. The problem is that Exodus treats the calling of Moses (Christian Bale) and the Flight from Egypt as a group of flashy signposts (the burning bush, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea) strung along by standard-issue sword-and-sandal folderol. The Book of Exodus is not entirely suited to an action film, but so what? Prophesy, prophesy, clang clang clang.

Between the notion that the parting of the Red Sea was a tsunami and Bale's positioning of Moses as less of a prophet than a shell-shocked war veteran with blood-stained hands and visions of a prissy preteen boy claiming, "I Am," Exodus approaches Noah's strongest moments of secularized sacred content. But Scott lacks Aronofsky's even just momentary commitment to queering the canon. Be those tornadoes or be they fingers of God, Exodus remains hopelessly lost on the fringes of a cinematic Canaan.

What of that ocean that gets parted? It's there that Sir Ridley is really in his element, orchestrating a massive chase and battle scene backgrounded by tempestuous tornadoes and tidal waves. It's a bloody gorgeous bit of comic-book pageantry that reaches an apex when Moses and Rhamses throw Sergio Leone-like shade at each other while a tsunami swells on the horizon. Really, like much of the movie, it's laughable in the best way—completely, committedly, and earnestly batshit.