Exodus: Gods and Kings

   

       Alternative titles – “Everyone is White,” “The Writers are Basing the Movie off of Sunday School Flannelgraphs and Not Off the Bible,” and “Moses, You’re Doing it Wrong.” Now, I've seen Dreamworks’ “Prince of Egypt” at least a dozen times, and know every word to every song in there, even that crazy song sung in Hebrew, so I defs know what I’m talking about when I say that this most recent adaptation is pretty weird. It’s mostly accurate, by which I mean “Christian Bale is obviously Moses, the plagues are sequential, Tzipporah is a hottie, and the Hebrew God is maybe just a little bit petulant.” So really, not that much accuracy. Errors, suspensions of belief, and laudable moments are as follows:

1. Moses and Ramses are both given swords with the words “short enough that you won’t trip over them.” Hurrrrr that’s what she said.
2. The only Black lady in the entire movie is obviously just hanging around in a position of sexual subservience. Way to go, typecasters.
3. Haha, yeah, Hebrew slave, when you came up to Moses in the middle of the street and told him to meet some random slave dude in the slave quarters at midnight, I’m sure no one noticed that, especially not the 6 guards that are all around Moses. Nah, bro, you’re good.
4. WHAT?!?!?!? No, Miriam did NOT put Moses in the river, her MOTHER did! Jeez, did you guys not read Exodus 2 at all? Have you been depending on flannelgraphs from Sunday School this whole time?
5. Moses, understandably super pissed that he’s a prole and not a prince, storms out and… kills an Egyptian guard…? Yeah, makes sense.
6. Moses is exiled because Ramses (now Pharaoh) is mad that he killed an Egyptian guard. Ok, yeah, that’s pretty on-point.
7. Goat toenail trimming is a great place to meet the ladies. Just ask Moses and Tzipporah, they’ll tell you. One minute they’re trimming goat toenails, the next, they’re getting married!
8. “Proceed,” is all Tzipporah says before Moses starts taking off her clothes. Um. Ok?
9. FAST FORWARD 10 YEARS WITHOUT TELLING US!!!! Or maybe it’s longer, I don’t know. Moses has a ten-year old son, so maybe they waited 5 years to have kids, and it’s actually been fifteen! Christian Bale doesn’t actually age though, because, as we all know, that dude is classic.
10. WHOA, MUDSLIDE ON THE MOUNTAIN!!!!
11. Moses takes a mudbath while God (a ten year old boy with a very petulant way of speaking), tells him to go fight for the Hebrews in a very nonspecific way. No instructions, nothing. The burning bush is just kind of chillin' in the background. I’m pretty disappointed in this scene, to be honest. That whole burning bush thing, with the “who made man’s mouth, who makes him deaf or mute?” is actually kind of my favorite part of the whole story, and this movie cut that out, which makes me really mad. Also, the “Prince of Egypt” soundtrack accompanying the scene is some of the most powerful music out there, and I’m sad that the whole burning bush scene is just Moses taking a mud bath while a ten-year-old boy talks smack to him.
12. Whoa, Moses, really, you haven’t told your WIFE that you grew up in Seti’s palace? You think that maybe, in 10-15 years of marriage, maybe that sort of thing should have come up BEFORE you went riding off back to Egypt again?
13. Tzipporah is not supportive at all, which is not how it is in Exodus. She goes with him, and when God tries to kill him this one time on the road (I regularly tell people to do something, and when they go to do it, I try to kill them. It happens to the best of us, I get it), she CUTS HER SON’S PENIS and puts the blood on Moses’s feet so that God can recognize him again. That is one of the weirder parts of the Exodus narrative.
14. In response to Moses’s classic “Let my people go,” Ramses is like “Yeah, no, because infrastructure, amirite?” And Moses is like “Oh, yeah, you’re right dude, that is a completely valid concern!” Haha, except not. He’s like “Ok, cool, hellfire and damnation, then!”
15. Pharaoh’s army looks like Stormtroopers in those hats.
16. Um no. Burning ships in the harbor? Training guerilla Hebrew slaves during the day? That’s not how this works. You gotta F.R.O.G! That stands for Fully Rely On God, for those who did not grow up in the evangelical tradition of the late 90s.
17. The god-child and Moses (no mudbath this time) have a conversation that basically goes like this: “Hey, Moses, remember that time when you were taking a mudbath and I told you that I needed a guy to go fight for the Hebrews? Well, you went and fought for the Hebrews, pretty much exactly like I told you (except I didn’t give you any specific instructions on how to do that), and it didn’t work, and now Pharoah is totes pissed. So now how about you sit back, relax, maybe take another mudbath, and watch me do my thing.”
18. The Nile is red because the crocodiles ate all the boat-men on the river, turning the river to blood. No.
19. Quick succession of the plagues, which, mercifully, are all in the right order, but unmercifully, are unaccompanied by the "Plagues" song from "Prince of Egypt," which is probably my favorite.
20. NO THE PLAGUES DO NOT AFFECT THE HEBREWS THAT’S NOT HOW THIS THING WORKS. *Caveat – I double-checked after the movie, and apparently the only plagues that do not specifically bother the Hebrews are the plague of darkness and the plague of the firstborn. My bad.
21. Oh for Pete’s sake you guys, those hailstones are NOT that big. Just chill out.
22. Ramses yells to an empty room about how he’s going to drown Hebrew children. He’s slowly going bonkers, probably because of the Egyptian nobility’s penchant for marrying their own fathers and daughters.
23. Ramses… you can’t just put your mummy-baby into that admittedly adorable little sarcophagus. Mummies need like 90 days to chill on a bed of salt and have their brains pulled out through their nose, and their organs packed in special little jars! Didn’t you read the mummy-making books in 3^rd grade like the rest of us?
24. Oh, what? Moses’s SWORD was the thing that divided the Red Sea?! WHAT??!?!?!? The subtle implications of that little change in narrative have HUGE ramifications. Suddenly, Moses is no longer the peaceful shepherd-vessel of God’s spirit, but the charging-forth champion FOR God! You guys, this is NOT COOL.
25. NO, NO, NO, WHERE IN THE BOOK OF EXODUS DOES “THEY WALKED ACROSS ON DRY LAND” TRANSLATE TO “THEY SLOGGED THROUGH WAIST-DEEP WATER”?!?!?!?!?!? Relatedly, slogging through waist-deep water with 400,000 other people and their panicked animals sounds like the best way to get oneself killed before reaching Canaan.
26. TORNADO?!?! I mean, whatever, it’s a little one, but… OMG *MORE* TORNADOES?!?!?! WTF, WHERE IS THE PILLAR OF FIRE?!?!?!!?!?
27. And then Moses’s guerilla fighters (that do not exist) go out and try to fight with Ramses’s charioteers? No, you guys, come ON, have you NOT read Exodus 14:14? The Old Testament Moses is a super hippie, he’s like “Yeah dudes, just chill, God’s gonna wipe these guys up like spilled milk, just calm down, it’ll be fine.”
28. A brief parlay with Ramses, with the converging combinations of tornadoes and the returning sea is a great idea, Moses! It’s awesome that you’re using your words instead of your sword in order to talk some sense into your former best friend, but for realz, dawg, you need to GTFO.
29. Hey Moses, maybe instead of throwing a rock at your son to let him know you’re back in town, maybe you wanna be like “Hey son, I’m BA-A-AA-ACK!!! Dja miss me?!!?” or something that doesn’t involve throwing rocks at your son.
30. Tzipporah is super excited to see 400,000 Hebrew refugees in her town, because that’s not a strain on the infrastructure AT ALL.
31. That’s super nice of the god-child to make Moses a cup of tea while he chisels out the Ten Commandments.
32. You guys, WHERE is Miriam in all of this?!?!!? The song of Moses and Miriam in Exodus 15 is SUPER nice, and they IGNORED IT!! And once they’re wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, who else but Miriam is supposed to get leprosy to teach Moses a lesson about trusting God? Seriously, the wimmins in this story get shafted.

      So yeah. That’s the story of “The ‘Exodus’ Writers Are Basing This Movie Off a Sunday School Flannelgraph and Not On The Bible.” It was just so… militaristic. So much less “Hey, God’s gonna fight for you, just chill,” and so much more “Yeah, God probs defs wants us to whip our swords out and kill the Egyptians!” And Moses’s staff was missing! It doesn’t get turned into a snake, it doesn’t part the Red Sea, it doesn’t get hit on a rock to produce fresh water, and it doesn’t turn the Nile into blood! I mean, this thing is a super important prop, and they just do away with it! Or, better yet, they TURN IT INTO A FREAKING SWORD, BECAUSE SWORDS ARE AWESOME YAY!!!!! I mean, you can just look at the movie poster, where his GIANT SWORD is just out there for the world to see, to see that this is not your typical Moses movie about your typical Midianite shepherd. It was pretty disappointed. My professional opinion is that you should not watch this film.