by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran us the recent (just released in theatres last January)
movie Gods of Egypt, a big, spectacular
fantasy with incredible computer-generated special effects and a pretty no-name
cast: the only actor I’d heard of before was Geoffrey Rush, who plays Ra, ruler
and apparently parent of all the other gods in the Egyptian pantheon. It’s a
spectacular fantasy set in ancient Egypt, or rather a never-never land version
thereof in which the Egyptian gods coexisted with ordinary people (in a plot
hole I flagged to imdb.com, ordinary people are referred to as “mortals” though
the gods themselves are also depicted as mortal), though there are a few people
here who have some modern reputation, including Gerard Butler as Set and
Chadwick Boseman (the Black actor who’s been admitted into the Marvel universe
as “The Black Panther”!) as Thoth. The film was directed by Alex Proyas
(actually Egyptian-born of Greek parents, but Australian-raised) from a script
written — or at least compiled —
by Matt Sazama and Burt Sharpless, and if you’re looking for a movie that
combines action with complex, multidimensional characters and a plot line that
makes sense, this isn’t it. If you just want to be dazzled by one spectacular
CGI shot after another, this is your movie! There is something of a plot: Ra, the Egyptian god of the
sun, fathered two brothers, Osiris (Bryan Brown, another actor I’ve actually
heard of, though his part isn’t long enough to make much of an impression —
more on that later) and Set. Ra gave Osiris rule of the fertile valleys on
either side of the Nile River, while he palmed off the far less desirable
assignment of ruling the deserts that constitute the rest of Egypt as well as
the underworld where the dead go to Set. Needless to say, Set was bitter about
this, so when he hears that Osiris is about to retire and turn over the throne
of Egypt to his son Horus (Nikolai Coster-Waldau, top-billed), he plots his
revenge. As a wedding gift — Horus is supposed to go through a combination
coronation and wedding to his fiancée Hathor (Elodie Yung) — Set presents Horus
with a hunting horn, and of course when Horus set it to his lips and blew one
note, I immediately started humming Siegfried’s horn call from Wagner’s Ring.
Of course, the horn call in this movie serves quite
a different function: that one note is all that’s needed to summon Set’s secret
army (it’s not clear whether they’re gods, people or undeads like the zombie
army in the most recent Mummy
film), who take over. Set kills Osiris and plucks out both of Horus’s eyes,
whereupon Horus retires into the desert like Oedipus at the end of Oedipus
Rex until a busy-body mortal named Bek
(played by a really cute twink named Brenton Thwaites) comes along. We’ve
already seen Bek (his name is bereft of the usual “c” to make him seem more
like an ancient Egyptian but I still couldn’t resist a Mystery
Science Theatre 3000-style joke, “If you’re
Beck, let’s see what you can do with two turntables and a microphone”) in the
opening sequence, stealing something or other (a purse? A jar? An amphora) from
a bazaar (where the people are anachronistically costumed in medieval Arab
style) to give to his girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton) so she can be properly
accessorized for the big event of Horus’s coronation and marriage — only Set
not only kills Osiris and blinds Horus but takes Hathor as his own mistress. He
also rewrites the laws of Egypt so people will now have to pay their way into
the afterlife instead of just being admitted automatically (the argument
between Osiris and Set over this just before Set kills Osiris sounds like a
debate about economic inequality between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump), and
he decrees that any gods who oppose him should be killed while all mortals
should be sold into slavery. Bek tries to rescue Zaya from her owner but she
ends up dead, and so he signs with Horus to steal back Horus’s eyes from Set in
exchange for Horus going into the afterlife and rescuing Zaya so they can be
together.
That’s about all the plot there is, and that’s about all the plot it needs,
but writers Sazama and Sharpless fall into a common trap of fantasy fiction
creators — including such major names as Neil Gaiman — namely, because they’re
working in a genre in which anything can happen, they make anything happen whether it
makes sense or not. I’ve long believed that fantasies actually require more complex story construction than other kinds of
stories so you don’t exceed the audience’s capacity to suspend disbelief.
Charles and I talked about this movie afterwards and raised the 1933 King
Kong and Ray Harryhausen’s Jason
and the Argonauts as movies this one
reminded us of — but Kong and Jason both had carefully constructed scripts that set up
the fantasy sequences in the context of a story that was easy to follow and
made dramatic sense. Gods of Egypt
is just one CGI thrill ride after another, and over the course of two hours it
gets wearying after a while. It also doesn’t help that the characters are the
typical black-and-white people of fantasy: the good guys are all good, the bad
guys are all bad, and there aren’t any genuinely conflicted characters like
Gollum a.k.a. Smeagle in The Lord of the Rings (another well-constructed fantasy; if anything, J.
R. R. Tolkien erred too much in the other direction, so carefully setting up
the backstory it got confusing, but he still cared enough to make these
realistic people caught up in a world in which fantastic things happened to
them, but in accordance with a set of rules carefully worked out by the author
instead of being arbitrarily shifted on us in mid-stream just to create a
transitorily “spectacular” effects scene).
Because the characters are so
one-dimensional and so arbitrarily manipulated in the service of a story whose
writers take it anywhere they feel like it, the poor actors are pretty much at
sea and it’s difficult to evaluate their performances the way one can in a
normal movie — though Brenton Thwaites (despite that mouthful of a name) is at
least cute, fun to watch and strongly reminiscent of the title character in
Disney’s animated version of Aladdin
in his cheekiness and infectious energy. Nikolai Coster-Waldau strikes me as
the sort of actor who could probably do very well in a realistic script — when
we first meet him he’s sleeping off an all-night drunk that made me briefly
wonder if the writers were going to give us a rehash of The Prisoner
of Zenda re-set in ancient Egypt (and that
might well have been a better movie than the one we got!) and Elodie Yung as
Hathor plays the closest this movie has to a multidimensional character,
leaving us somewhat in suspense whether she enjoys having been pressed into
service as Set’s sex slave or is longing to avenge herself against him and get
back with Horus. Gods of Egypt is
perfect evidence for film writers like David Thomson who believe that, after
100 years of cinematic evolution, film has reverted to the condition it was in
when the Lumière brothers dug a hole under a railroad track so they could
safely film a train bearing down on their camera — and audience members,
thinking a real train was bearing
down on them, fled the theatre. Gods of Egypt is a movie for audiences who want pure sensation —
even when nothing fantastic is happening, the camera tracks over the digital
representations of ancient Egypt with the vertiginous speed of something in an
IMAX movie — and it’s also one of those movies that seems to have been less
written than merely compiled;
when the writers have the good guys strolling through great expanses of desert
(filmed in Australia because the filmmakers decided shooting in the real Sahara
would be too dangerous) composer Marco Beltrami supplies us an instantly
recognizable quote from Maurice Jarre’s music from Lawrence of
Arabia, and later when the bad guys chase
them through the desert riding giant-sized desert snakes I joked, “Well, somebody had seen Dune.”
