"A wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left..."

Following on from part 1 here, the attempt to tease out what aesthetic or polemical purpose lies behind the spectacular failure of Scott's attempt at an epic retelling of Exodus by remaking' Hollywood's previous retellings in such a strange and counter-intuitive way--

Cecil B. DeMille himself, with prop replica stone tablets, from the original trailer
(Credit: © 1956 Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Pyxurz)

I say "counter-intuitive," because the proper artistic purpose of a new production of an old property is to bring something new to the table -- a new narrative perspective, a new technical facility, at very least a new visual feel -- for the purpose of improving on the past productions, or at least doing something different to justify the effort and audience's money.

This is especially true of movies, where the earlier project can be compared to the new one, as opposed to live theatre where a new staging or directorial interpretation is part of the experience and the expectation. "Why do it over again, instead of restoring the old print to pristine quality?" is the question that has to be asked -- and sometimes it's obvious, some things don't age well, but when you're remaking a beloved classic (or several) then the need to justify it goes right up there with "Does this story really need a sequel?"

Of course the cynical answer is, "Maybe not -- but we need the money!" But that is only an answer for investors -- never for artists. Maybe the creators are deluded in thinking "We can do it so much better this time!" but that is what they should be thinking, when they set out to remake something rather than tackling an original story.

So we have already seen that of the past three big-budget classic Hollywood versions of the Exodus story, the first brought the scope and scale and all that "cast-of-thousands" glamour to depicting an ancient world right out of the Doré Bible engravings, on a scale that few could rival, to the bare words of text and static images that had up to then been all that existed in Western religious traditions, both Jewish and Christian; while the second, by the same creator, added the technological advances of audio, full colour imagery, and an even bigger budget setting to take advantage of it -- and a heightened emotional drama, as well.

The third in some ways returned to the more stylized visuals of the earlier era, but shifted the direction of the emotional appeals and heightened them with musicality, so that while it covered much of the same territory from the same directions as its predecessors, in a way that paid its respects to the past, it was no mere rehash of them.

So, again, what is supposed to be the attraction of Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings? CGI battles between anonymous masses of CGI extras? We can get those from video games. Why should we pay to see them in the theatre? This isn't my complaint alone -- it's showing up in a lot of reviews, along with the word "forgettable," generally yoked with complaints about thin, absent, or implausible characterization of the few main characters.

One of the common contemporary praises for the 1956 Ten Commandments is that even minor characters like the Egyptian ladies-in-waiting and the army commander get vivid roles, that you feel for them even though they're The Enemy. When even your main characters come off as flat and lifeless, your production is in serious trouble.

Perhaps one way to look at it is, what could a 2014 remake bring, besides better special effects? A pure, beat-by-beat remake of DeMille's masterpiece, treating the script like that of a play, and challenging the new director and actors to interpret the visuals and inhabit the roles their own way, could be really interesting. But that isn't what Scott did.

"All the rivers run into the sea..."

"and yet the sea does not overflow" -- or, what's wrong with Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (the short version)

The true Ramses is not impressed.

It has been both fascinating and horrifying to watch Sir Ridley Scott torch his own artistic reputation like David O. Selznick with a city set in front of him -- no matter how uneven it had become prior to his zenith in 2000, when Gladiator gave CPR to the defunct sword-and-sandal genre by mixing art-film camerawork and modern actioner violence with a CGI rendition of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's visions of antiquity as backdrop to a time-transplanted Dirty Harry story that somehow just worked, for all of its anachronisms, flaws, and missed beats.

It's also been very baffling to his devoted fans, and while I am not one of them -- although I did like Gladiator very much, enough to see it in the theatres more than once when it came out -- I too find the relentless defiant decline in the face of constructive criticism a strange thing, so strange that I have been struggling to piece together a rationale for it that would account for the catastrophes of Robin Hood, The Counsellor, Prometheus, and now Exodus: Gods and Kings, which has so dramatically failed to pull his reputation out of its nose-dive as of its opening weekend.

I think we can safely say that Scott did not set out to -- better? worsen? -- let us say, out-do -- The Counsellor's RT score, that that at least was a misfire. Surely nobody sets out to get less than 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, unless maybe Uwe Boll. But when even the "freshest" reviews are almost universally tepid -- summed up as, "it's not as bad as it could be, parts of it are even good" -- and critics increasingly wonder if your work is all some sort of elaborate satire or attempt to punk the viewer -- even if only posit it as an improbability in a joking manner, but a joke with a nervous edge beneath -- and you are not an inexperienced newbie but a veteran filmmaker with many awards and even more positive recognition to your name, the producing of something so predictably a disappointment cannot be chalked up to mere accident.

It takes effort to spend a vast fortune on a melodramatic historical spectacle and have the overwhelming response be "Meh." Even utter, trashy badness is better than that -- a spectacular failure has the potential for entertainment value, appealing to that side of humanity's collective consciousness that thrives on trainwreck and schadenfreud. "Is it really that bad? Drinking game! Who's bringing the popcorn?"

But alas, not even that seems to be the fate of Exodus: Gods and Kings.

There may be Seven Deadly Sins in western ethical tradition (though all of them no less condemned in Buddhism and Hinduism) but the Eighth Deadly Sin is far worse than Pride, Anger, Greed, Jealousy, or the other failings of moderation and empathy, when it comes to storytelling-- and that is Dullness. The Eleventh Commandment is "Thou Shalt Not Be Boring," and the only one that matters in Hollywood.

And yet, he cannot have thought that an impersonal, underwritten, overly-CGI-laden remake of not one, but three classic predecessors, would get any other response from today's audience -- not when the outcry against overly-CGI-laden, underwritten "epics" lacking in plot logic and engaging characterizations has been steadily rising for over a decade, in every review and forum dedicated to media discussion. Surely the creator of Alien and Thelma and Louise must have some sense that for the spectacle and special effects to grip us, we must first have some reason to care about who ARE these people and what is happening to them?

Especially after so many people have been trying to tell him that this is why they liked Gladiator, not the fight scenes and the digital dioramas, since Robin Hood, at least, and the critical consensus that he shouldn't have bothered releasing the abridged version of Kingdom of Heaven seeing as it was so dreadful without any of that character motivation and personality that the studio apparently thought was so boring and silly, that it badly damaged his reputation among fans until the extended version came out -- as well as losing money, making it a pointless exercise all round.

So either he has lost his sense of the dramatic -- lost the plot! -- altogether, and there is no one around him powerful or brave enough to tell him so (at least until he has screwed up their summer tentpole, as in the Robin Hood fiasco) or he is trying to accomplish something else, and making a good movie is secondary to that.

I suppose that it could all be a selfless attempt to assist the work of other filmmakers -- a sort of leaping on the critical grenade to make Aronofsky's Noah look better by comparison, going by the number of times that remark has come up in reviews and viewer discussions online! Or else a humble way of directing audiences back to the better, earlier versions of the Exodus story -- namely The Ten Commandments and Prince of Egypt -- through the inevitabe comparisons, judging by the frequency with which they are recommended in the same reviews and comment threads about Exodus: Gods and Kings!

But Scott hardly seems the humble and self-effacing sort, so I do not think that is the likely answer. I suspect that any plausible rationale will be found only by asking the question that 20th Century Fox should have asked long ago:

What reason(s) could there be to remake Cecil B. DeMille's epic in the first place?

Since DeMille himself remade his own epic to take advantage of new technologies -- namely, sound and colour -- this is no mere rhetorical question. So let us consider what all reasons there might be, and whether or not Scott's version fulfills (any of) them.

(For the record, this is all from the perspective of an agnostic-skeptic who was raised in the Apocalyptic fringes of a very mainstream church, but in a strand which nevertheless had something of a historical awareness of rabbinic tradition and conceded that other faiths had merit, and now prefers the term "mythic humanist" to secular humanist, taking the Pratchettian view that our myths and legends are a crucial part of what make us human, and that to try to excise them from our collective consciousness is both as destructive as self-induced amnesia, and as futile as trying to cut off one's own shadow -- better far to comprehend and comprehending, redirect those narrative energies into constructive and beneficial channels, than to try to obliterate them from our social universe!)

1. Superior Technology

This is a given, since recent decades' combinations of bluescreen/greenscreen, digital compositing, and 3D modeling have made all kinds of special effects believable that were impossible in the past.

There is no question that Scott's Exodus uses these to accomplish things that were done much more simply or not at all, in the 1956 film -- but one very bizarre omission is the scene in DeMille's version that would most have benefitted from a modern touch! Referring of course to the staff-snake transformation sequence, which is very obviously hand-animated and composited with a real cobra, in the older movie, and due to the differing medium gets a more seamless but highly-stylized treatment in 1998's Prince of Egypt, which does depict the battle of the rival clerics' avatars, where DeMille's production went with the older horror-movie trope of the actors' reaction shots to tell that part of the tale.