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#410 - Gods of Egypt
Alex Proyas, 2016
When a tyrannical god takes over ancient Egypt, a mortal thief joins forces with a fallen god to fight back.
I'm not especially fond of the whole "switch off your brain" approach to watching movies - surely such a work's true quality lies in its ability to positively affect people even when they are "switched on", as it were - but Gods of Egypt may just be a movie that accepts no other approach. Leaving aside the indefensibly egregious whitewashing on display (which is almost justifiable when the characters in question are living gods, but definitely not when they are regular Egyptian humans), it really does work when its garish approach to high fantasy is saturating the screen in colours you can drink and computer effects that would have to work their way up to being unconvincing. If there is an especially serious weakness with the movie, it's the human hero (Brenton Thwaites) who is a constant annoyance in virtually all of his scenes and so it becomes difficult to invest in his particular plight. Thankfully, the movie as a whole is not centred around him and we are treated to a variety of established performers who make the most of the bizarre material they get. Gerard Butler does his shouty 300 thing as the villain while Nikolaj Coster-Waldau also recycles Jaime Lannister's brand of weary snark to amusing effect (especially against the aforementioned Thwaites). Gods of Egypt doesn't exactly manage to claw its way to respectability, but it's far from the biggest travesty I've had to witness this year. It may grate at times, but its lurid tale of mythologically-based adventure yields some surprisingly watchable results.
Alex Proyas, 2016
When a tyrannical god takes over ancient Egypt, a mortal thief joins forces with a fallen god to fight back.
I'm not especially fond of the whole "switch off your brain" approach to watching movies - surely such a work's true quality lies in its ability to positively affect people even when they are "switched on", as it were - but Gods of Egypt may just be a movie that accepts no other approach. Leaving aside the indefensibly egregious whitewashing on display (which is almost justifiable when the characters in question are living gods, but definitely not when they are regular Egyptian humans), it really does work when its garish approach to high fantasy is saturating the screen in colours you can drink and computer effects that would have to work their way up to being unconvincing. If there is an especially serious weakness with the movie, it's the human hero (Brenton Thwaites) who is a constant annoyance in virtually all of his scenes and so it becomes difficult to invest in his particular plight. Thankfully, the movie as a whole is not centred around him and we are treated to a variety of established performers who make the most of the bizarre material they get. Gerard Butler does his shouty 300 thing as the villain while Nikolaj Coster-Waldau also recycles Jaime Lannister's brand of weary snark to amusing effect (especially against the aforementioned Thwaites). Gods of Egypt doesn't exactly manage to claw its way to respectability, but it's far from the biggest travesty I've had to witness this year. It may grate at times, but its lurid tale of mythologically-based adventure yields some surprisingly watchable results.