Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) Review

A retelling of the story of Moses, how he discovers who he truly is and must rise up and fight the empire in order to free his people.

These types of films always come with a little bit of controversy surrounding them with being from the bible and having God in them. This one is no different and before I went to see the film I read that it has been banned in Egypt. This always makes me want to see a film even more to see why exactly someone has taken offence to it.

It starts with Moses and Ramses, who believe they are cousins running the empire and treating one another like brothers. It does not take long for Ramses to seize as much power as possible when his father days and he is the new Pharaoh of Egypt for things to turn sour. Especially when Moses is told something about his past, but is it really true?

The film is pretty long, which isn’t always a problem. Expect the pace of it is too slow, it takes ages for it to get going but where does it actually get going? I am not entirely sure it actually does go anywhere in particular. The scenes with the plagues are pretty decent, good use of CGI.

Obviously the main part you are waiting for (probably due to the running time as well) is when he parts the sea. I had an idea of how that would look in my mind, which confirms my mind works differently to Ridley Scott’s. I did like how he done that scene though, I just expected it in a different way.

It’s not the best you will see of Christian Bale who is certainly one of my favourite actors still working at the moment. I could not help but think of Ben Kingsley’s as Mandarin in Iron Man 3, yes I know very strange but I think it was the hair. Aaron Paul should have been used more in my opinion, just glimpses of him every now and then.

The story and idea behind it all are good, we haven’t had a big screen adaptation of a bible story for so long now. Oh wait we had Noah last year and that was pretty awful. I would say this one is a bit better than that if you like comparisons. But it really did feel just so long, I think it could have been about 20/30 minutes shorter without losing anything from the story telling methods.

The representation of God as a young boy? Well that sure is interesting, but I like the idea that you can think of God in any form you want. Surely we can link that Moses was thinking about his young son? Well I don’t know if that is what they were going for but that’s my thoughts and I am sticking to it.