"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.
This clear reveal of the presence of warring supernatural powers -- something that is presented as a bit ho-hum in the original text, the kind of stock, low-budget miracle that any competent priest of a Mediterranean deity could manage back in those days! -- is something that Scott eschews, for reasons that are unclear given his narrative oscillation between trying to present the Exodus narrative in a naturalistic, non-mythicized light, and apparently accepting the mystical element after a certain point.
That isn't a joke, about the contextually unimpressive nature of the staff-to-serpent polymorph, for the Midrash has this extended version of that scene, which slights it as "Carrying coals to Newcastle" by getting a bunch of school kids and the Queen to do the same thing, showing that it was barely even apprentice-level, amateur-hour wonder-working -- literally kiddie-stuff, to the Egyptians:
When Moses was performing the miracles in Egypt to convince the Egyptians that he was the messenger of God, Pharaoh simply ridiculed him and asked him ironically, 'Art thou bringing straw to Eprayne (where there was plenty)? Art thou not aware that the Egyptians are past masters in magic? People usually take their wares to places where they are scarce. Here children of four or five years of age can work this sort of conjuring.' And he actually had some children brought out of school, and they and Pharaoh's wife performed similar works to those of Moses. 'Is he a wise man,' continued Pharaoh, 'who carries muria (a sort of salt) 1 to Spain or fish to Acco?' Moses refrained from controversy, but merely replied, 'Where there is the market of greenstuff there I take my greenstuff.'--Exod. Rabba 9)Interestingly, the simple direct presentation in DeMille's version is something that works in the film just as it does in the original story, as a way of signaling the real presence of the Numinous in the tale -- even though to contemporary audiences, even Jewish and Christian viewers of the Fifties, whose religion for the most part was filtered through a skepticism perhaps even greater than that of the ancient Mediterranean, when fake magicians and false oracles were all too well known, it would have meant something rather different than to audiences encountering the story thousands of years earlier, to whom it would be signifying a first-level fight gradually building up to the big final boss battle, but not (probably) seen as symbolic or fictional, except to the most educated and travelled elite who might well have been aware of similarities to other legends from neighboring nations.
But contextually, the staff-to-serpent transformation serves the same purpose as the slaying of the Sphinx in the Oedipus cycle, or the Nemean Lion in the plays about Heracles -- even though those events took place outside the timeframe of the dramas due to the limits of Athenian real-time practical effects, their reality was not in question within the stories themselves, and served to establish to the viewers that no matter how absent the Olympians seemed to be from their present reality, at least back in the Age of Heroes there were gods and demi-gods and monsters (some of whom were the same individuals) and so the viewer -- then just as now -- knew that when the angry king rejected the words of the oracle warning him that some apparently-natural phenomenon was actually a curse, there was a good chance of it being true, within the story -- although on the other hand, it certainly was possible that the oracle was mistaken, or bought off by the king's enemies, or that all the omens were natural coincidences, which helped to create a dramatic tension in an old story where everyone knew the ending for generations already.
And which, as it was being retold in modern language for a modern audience, emphasizing different characters or taking a controversial side in this new version, was less important as a "historically/literally-true story" and more a just-so story or a mirror of contemporary society that provided not simply emotional catharsis but material for reflection. And this surely was no less true for Jewish audiences in Babylon and Alexandria and throughout the Roman diaspora, as it was for Greek audiences during their own internal social upheavals, the corruption of Delphi and the Peloponnesian War and the coming of Alexander.
But where the Torah provided ample fodder for the Midrash, the commentaries that provided expanded narratives and characterizations for the Scripture tales that were bald and obscure even thousands of years ago, and the conclusions of the Athenian tragedies were often denunciations of the injustice of the gods who fated mortals to fail and then punished them for it or of the brutality and ultimately-unsatisfactory nature of pure justice applied in the name of the Law without regard for context or compassion until all the participants are dead or wishing they were, it's hard to see any such complex musings coming out of Scott's quasi-naturalistic take on such a conflict, because of his failure to bring anything whatsoever new to the story besides the miracle of crocodilians jumping like great white sharks -- going on to the next reason!
2. A New Angle On The Material
When ancient Greek playwrights tackled their own epics and national origin myths, they did so in order to make familiar stories into something new and different that would -- hopefully! -- entertain their compatriots enough that their work would win prizes at the ancient equivalent of film festivals.This could take the form of humanizing the larger-than-life heroes of legend, fleshing out their personalities and detailing the interactions that led to their famously tragic endings, so that viewers would care when the inevitable catastrophe happened.
Or it could take the more controversial route of giving the traditional "bad guys" of the story a greater role, a more sympathetic portrayal, to make the audience see that reality wouldn't have been as simple as it is in fables, even in the days of yore -- showing the Trojans and Persians as human beings just like themselves, whose suffering needed to be remembered against the temptations of nostalgic triumphalism -- there but for Zeus go I! Even stereotypical villainesses like Klytemnestra and Helen got to present their sides of events, and the flaws of the traditional "heroes" were ruthlessly detailed.
Sometimes -- as was so much the case with Aristophanes that his plays are still put on for the same reason -- they also did so as social and political commentary, and the question of whether or not they were being anachronistic by having the gods and heroes of old make topical jokes (let alone accurate!) simply wasn't in order, any more than it is when considering a Mel Brooks or Monty Python take on the same sort of subject matter.
Cecil B. DeMille's stated reason for making a movie version of the Exodus story in 1923 was to help bring about world peace, in the wake of the devastation of WWI -- something the opening crawl blames on a society that had turned its back on religion.
The whole film is public domain and may be watched on YouTube or downloaded from Archive.org, which though sadly low-res preserves the early colourized sequences, in which the parting of the Red Sea is given a bloody crimson hue!
The utility of the Decalogue in creating a world without wars is certainly debatable, as is the notion that Europe in 1914 was drastically more irreligious than it was in 1814, or during the Thirty Years' War, or the Hundred Years' War (except in consequence of its wars of religion!) but nevertheless the argument is one that was frequently made by pundits during and immediately after The War To End All Wars -- and even if DeMille's principle goal was to make buckets of money by getting butts into seats, the public one was to influence society through storytelling. If The Ten Commandmants was propaganda, it's a curiously-honest instance of it.
When he revisted it some thirty years later, another world war had put the Great War's terminal boast to rest and the world itself was a very different place, in so many ways, and one of them was demonstrated in the trailers for the remake, which are very bookish and ponderous and stress the amount of historical research done for the new version.
We might laugh today at the notion of "historical accuracy" in a Fifties sword-and-sandal flick, but it was a value to audiences such that studios needed to address it -- even, or perhaps particularly, when retelling a story of the supernatural. But that was hardly the greatest change he made, even while he maintained much of the look and feel of his first telling.
The 1923 Ten Commandments very much resembles his own later film Cleopatra, as well as D.W. Griffith's 1916 Intolerance, in the shared emphasis on wretched excess lovingly and frenetically depicted, and also the juxtaposition of parallel stories in different timelines intended to show repeating patterns throughout history. (It also starts out with an unpleasant callback to Griffith's Birth of a Nation, where Moses' sister Miriam is introduced as the fragile, lily-white victim of workplace harassment by the much darker-complexioned overseer.)
While all the beats familiar from later versions are there in the silent film -- the magnificently-scaled and detailed sets at least somewhat based on real archeological sites (the remains of the sphinxes in the first scene were recently rediscovered on the California coast, holding up surprisingly well for unprotected artifacts made of plaster), the masses of male slaves in shabby loincloths being beaten and crushed beneath the weight of the monuments they are forced to build, the glittering panoply of royalty -- this first cinematic Exodus retelling starts almost at the end -- not even in media res! -- as Moses is a wizardly figure in his first appearance with long grizzled beard and gnarled wooden staff, and when he arrives on-screen to challenge Pharaoh, nine of the ten plagues have already taken place off-stage.
And all of it is merely the prologue to the main story, of a modern-day American family whose two brothers are contrasted by different attitudes towards their religion -- the good brother who is honest and kind, and the bad brother who is greedy and ruthless, until his dishonest business practices result in their own mother's death -- at which point he falls into a self-destructive spiral of increasing crimes and perishes miserably at sea!
It isn't clear -- to this viewer at least -- how exactly the story was supposed to operate as a force for social change, either on an emotional or an intellectual level, given that for about 1800 years all the major social and political powers of the West -- with all their violence, war, exploitation and financial corruption -- were loudly and openly and officially Christian, with a professed and mandatory allegiance to doctrines that regardless of denomination all included the Ten Commandments. And that this was true of the warring nations in 1914, just as it had been through the long centuries of territorial warfare between England and France and Spain, with only a brief hiatus on one side during the decades of the French Republic following their Revolution.
To place the blame for a World War between rival superpowers after decades (or rather generations) of political jockeying interspersed with escalating conflicts, on a small minority of increasingly-open atheists and agnostics pushing against the official state churches in Europe and the effectively-mandatory social Christianity of North America, instead of on the governments engaged in arms races and semi-secret plans for conquest while protesting otherwise right up until that fateful summer, just seems naive at best -- dishonest at worst, and so not the sort of thing that would convince anyone the least bit logical or politically aware in the Twenties that they ought to head for chapel of a Sunday once more -- or stop substituting dangerously-inferior materials in their contracts if they weren't already disinclined to commit fraud, as if the two were in any way connected!
But what it did certainly accomplish was to both feed and whet the long-standing public appetite for big-budget historical spectacles: it was a hit in late 1923, or at least the first part, the Ancient Egypt part, was. (The modern-day parable, not so much -- critics found it a severe disappointment, by comparison.)
No doubt this was partly -- or even mostly -- the result of that year's revelation of the discovery of Tutankhamun's nearly intact tomb by Howard Carter, causing a worldwide resurgence of enthusiasm for all things even nominally Egyptian unmatched since the Napoleonic Era. And it's hard not to see DeMille's rudimentary attempts at accuracy in sets and costumes as reflecting the media deluge of imagery from the Valley of the Kings that spring -- filming started in May of 1923, while the burial chamber had been opened in February after the tomb's initial discovery the previous November. (Can you imagine bringing a full-length -- over two hours long! -- action-filled, big-budget, cast-of-thousands epic from principal shooting to premier in less than eight months -- and all without the help of digital effects? Yet they managed it, somehow.)
So the world of DeMille's remake was in many ways a very different place, and in others not so much: both movies followed a war of incomprehensible brutality and scale, and both took place in a time where the old maps of Empire were being redrawn, with the eastern Mediterranean as a locus of conflict. The troubles that continue unremittingly to this day are direct consequences of the WWI fallout of "El Aurens" and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, of British Petroleum ambitions and the sparks provided by the Treaty of Versailles -- all of which arose from legacies of superpower conflict going back far beyond Napoleon, to the medieval Crusader kingdoms of Outre-mer and ultimately back to Rome and centuries before, when the coveted resource was grain and fertile irrigated soil for growing it, not oil underground, but the military need for strategic access to ports and seaways that led to millennia of imperial wars and client states persisting unchanged.
So there was, and still is, much potential for political commentary in retelling old stories -- but it is fraught with peril, because making definitive statements and choosing sides is going to alienate those who disagree, and yet at the same time trying to avoid all historical context, all the resonances of past-into-present is equally alienating, a sort of fusty, timorous antiquarianism that flinches from the world outside its ivory tower. Bluntly, there is no way that Biblical epics in the Fifties and ever since could be made without acknowledging at least on some level the shadows of the Holocaust and Gaza -- just as it is impossible to make one without acknowledging the messy complications of Christian appropriations and conflicting reinterpretations of the Torah through the Middle Ages and after, particularly in an era when "History of Religion" and "Comparative Religion" are readily-accessible subjects for those who choose to be informed.
Well, all right -- it's possible to make a totally-disconnected-from-any-reality work of Torah-inspired cinematic fanfic, but very few people had anything good to say about Aronofsky's Noah.
It seems that if you're going to make a quasi-historical, quasi-mythographic film, and are constrained on multiple fronts from saying anything very controversial, anything too trenchant or too partisan or too overtly critical of anyone at all, then you really have to go with the personal drama, as your primary angle of human interest. You need to make your heroes, villains, and supporting ensemble all larger-than-life archetypal figures, who can stand for whatever the audience wishes, without (overtly, at least) referencing any present-day personalities in their portrayals.
And that is what the three previous big-screen versions of the Exodus story did, in their own varying ways.
The 1923 Ten Commandments is barely more developed, plot-wise, than a pageant on a float -- it's a very static tableau even for a silent movie, full of pose-striking and short on title cards, and most of those nothing but direct quotes from Scripture. But it does prefigure the remake, with its expanded soap-operatic plot, and the main way it does so is by giving the villain some good scenery-chewing lines nowhere to be found in the Book of Exodus itself -- like this Conan-foreshadowing bit of bombast!
"Thinkest thou the curse of thy god can destroy the son of Pharaoh — whose golden sandals have been beaten from the crowns of conquered kings?"
"I kneel but to one, the Lord God of Israel — who hath smitten the Egyptians with nine plagues, because thou dost not let his people go!"
And, ultimately, the Pharaoh is more sympathetic, because he is given a characterization, even if it's the rather elementary characterization of "arrogant tyrant who nevertheless loves his family and has his religious faith shattered" by the karmic tragedy of his own son dying like the firstborn sons of the Hebrew slaves--
Only -- that part being missing from the oldest version, as it is from the newest one, makes that sense of a terrible justice coming full circle entirely lacking in the story -- we feel sorry for the struggling masses beaten and ground up in the service an out-of-control landscaping project, if we have any empathy at all, but they're never given any of the personalizing moments that, say, Lord Dunsany gave the garden slaves in his 1911 short-but-brilliant play King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior.
Now Dunsany's historical-fantasy dramas are themselves very nearly tableaus full of archetypes themselves -- proud God-kings, shallow Courtiers, cynical Soldiers, solemn Prophets, cautious Merchants, wily Thieves -- but they are full of tiny little humanizing details, little short exchanges that show us who these people are and why we should care about the inevitable Apocalypse heading their way. And DeMille, who manages to do this elsewhere in the movie, particularly seems influenced by Dunsany in the portrayal of the Egyptian royal court, with the Queen and her ladies-in-waiting -- who are nowhere to be found in the original Scripture verses! (
So this is a problem for DeMille's first take on the story, namely that his Villain comes out as more monstrous, but also more human, and just all-over more interesting, than his Hero. I suspect the reason here was excess of reverence for a legendarily-holy figure -- how to present a man as worthy of deepest respect, if we see him embroiled in family squabbles or looking less than in control at all times? But the consequence is to make him entirely unrelatable, and that's a major problem.
Admirably, this is not a mistake he would make in his remake: the story starts with Moses as the helpless little "baby in the bullrushes" familiar from so many retellings and depictions down the centuries, and fleshes out the implications of Moses being adopted by an Egyptian princess by setting up the now-familiar story of the two princes growing up together in the royal court, with a very humanized though still-larger-than-life characterization.
The entirely-fanon addition of a love triangle to provide added fuel for the foster brothers' rivalry, in addition to their shared "daddy issues" spurring their competition, may be both cliche and soap-operatic -- but it's a motivation that is as old as mythology itself, and serves to do two things, narratively: it complicates the whole "enemy cleric/revolutionary" business immensely for the protagonist, and it provides yet another female main character with her own priorities, motivations, and choices in a movie that straight-out begins with female action and choice driving the plot in subversion of the ultra-masculine martial and political forces that seem to rule the world unchallenged. Moses' biological mother and sister and his adoptive mother conspire to protect a helpless innocent, in defiance of the laws and power of the state, and everything -- everything! -- hinges upon this.
In the parlance of Old Hollywood, the 1953 Ten Commandments is definitely a "Women's Picture." (It's all the more obvious, by virtue of all of this being taken out in Ridley Scott's remake -- more on that later.)
I know, it isn't considered that way at all these days -- but that's the secret to its intial success and its longevity, that it focuses on the personal relationships and emotional drama of the characters -- familial and romantic -- just as much as on the action sequences, the spectacles, miracles and battles. And thus, when those plagues and armies clash by night, we as witnesses actually have some stake in the outcomes, no matter how predetermined they are (or seem) by virtue of this being a well-told tale.
And so something is added, on several levels at once: a touch of suspense, since we now no longer know exactly how it's going to turn out -- what will happen to these original characters and characters who had no significant roles in the original text? what choices will they make, and why, to get the ones from the orignal story to where they need to end up, according to the book?
And in the process, a new angle: it's no longer a story of completely-cardboard sadistic villains and pitiful victims, but a story of a prosperous society totally oblivious to the humanity of its underclass -- including the subversive potential for resistance -- not incomprehensible monsters, any more than humans have ever been, and thus a warning for First Worlders who choose to take it -- whether that was what DeMille consciously intended or not.
Probably not, from what I've read of the man -- but so many things creep in when telling a tale, and the more complex -- as is drama -- the more the power of Narrative Causality is felt. Tropes are struck, and the resonances are picked up by the most unexpected things and form strange harmonies.
And thus, whether it was a deliberate stylistic choice or not, the dark ostrich plumes of the royal fanbearers in the 1923 version appear to be giant carrion birds hanging over the doomed Pharaoh's gleaming throne room, a bit of possibly-inadvertent symbolism that, once seen, cannot be unseen. It's possible that it just felt right, and that's why it was staged that way, because of a subconscious awareness of the shape of vast dark wings and the appropriateness of it on a symbolic level. Or it could have been entirely intentional -- I'm not sure if anyone ever wrote anything down about the production design of the first Ten Commandments, or if anyone is still living who would know.
In a similar way, there is now, by starting the story at the beginning, with the slaughter of the Hebrew infants and the Baby in the Basket, a powerful symbolic and thematic link forged with the narrative of the Plagues -- the Chosen One carried by their own sacred river into the household of his people's enemies; the life-giving waters that were historically the source of all of Egyptian prosperity transformed into blood as an accusation of guilt, a reminder that the ruling elite may have forgotten their bloody population control measure a generation ago but others have not, and never will; and finally, the terrible divine retribution, their own children subjected to the same fate they sentenced their subjects' to--
It's very reminiscent of Dunsany, who was deliberately trying to write a combination of modern naturalistic psychological drama and biblical "high style" in his plays, and how he skillfully leaves it open in so many of them as to whether the apparent works of wrathful deities or the interference of Destiny in the affairs of humanity are purely natural events, only coincidentally following upon the characters' prayers and prophecies, which themselves reflect social or political undercurrents of which the speakers are at least subliminally aware, and which bring about fallout that makes them self-fulfilling -- or if that naturalistic explanation is simply a covering for greater mechanisms at work in the universe, beyond our ken. The main point being, we will never know -- so all we can do is choose, and act, as best we can!
And to this attempt by DeMille to bring a plausible human perspective amid all the signs and wonders on the stage, is added a bit of a theological corrective: the apparent injustice of the Exodus narrative saying that it was the same deity who demanded that Pharaoh comply, and then brainwashed him into refusing so as to have an excuse to punish him harder next time.
Instead of trying to rationalize this in the traditional Christian apologetics way of "command morality" -- more commonly known as Lawful alignment these days, the belief that whatever an authority figure does is automatically right, so long as it's a legitimate authority, and if you've spotted an endless GOTO loop in that argument you're not alone or mistaken -- The Ten Commandments makes it plain that the three personalities involved, their long history together of rivalry and hope and disappointment, are what makes it impossible to achieve any kind of non-lethal resolution.
This feuding First Family is never going to be able to set their pride and grudges aside to try to find a common solution, a better way forward to a restorative justice for their people's next generations -- even if it doesn't make any sense to keep up the feud on so many levels -- and you can call it Fate or God's will or psychology at work, depending on your perspective when trying to find an explanation as to why smart, reasonable indivduals pursue obviously self-destructive paths against all common sense, but the triumph of the older films is in making it unnecessary for there to be any sort of celestial mind-control going on, while still operating in that mythic frame of a time when mages and miracles were real--
Which is mainly a testament to the skill of the actors involved, in selling that tangled mess of personal history and love-hate relationships, while still managing to project a commanding presence out of the realm of epic, with or without a romance triangle.
Because Prince of Egypt, the animated 1998 take on the Exodus story, while following the 1956 Ten Commandments fanon in both large and small ways, from changing the setting of it from a generic "long ago" to the same specific dynasty in Egypt, to the framing of the protagonist and antagonist as brothers with a long personal history -- again, something implicit in the Torah, not an unwarranted extrapolation at all, but not one that is ever addressed in the text! though so many fans of both films believe it is -- added an even more wrenching twist to that shading, by making Moses and Ramses not rivals from the start, as in the live-action version, but BFFs who never expected to be on opposite sides of a war, and who both desperately want not to hurt each other, until the political forces and the dismal toll of the campaign of attrition push them irretrievably apart.
It is certainly possible to see some historical parallels to the situation between the royal houses of Europe, all of them descendants of Queen Victoria, some of them close personal friends, before WWI -- although as far as I know, nobody at Dreamworks was consciously trying to make that comparison, either. (I could certainly be wrong, and would be glad to know if it was intentional.)
Prince of Egypt, however, is certainly trying to make a broader point regarding the horrors of war, the effects on civilians -- even enemy civilians! for the members of the oppressing nation are not dehumanized at all, in this cartoon -- and how even the joy of a liberating victory must be tempered with the consciousness of all the suffering and loss of life that it took to accomplish.
This is a very humanist perspective, and not inherently a modern one: as mentioned above, the Greek playwrights were quite capable of evoking empathy for their historic enemies, and depicting "the lamentations of their women" as no less tragic than those of the traditional good guys. Indeed, it's hard to find such empathy in the past few decades' worth of war movies coming out of Hollywood: the ethical justice of collective punishment -- at least for our opponents -- and the irrelevance of bystander casualties are much more common in our era.
"If they don't look like us or talk like us, we don't need to feel for them," is the attitude of most action directors in America today, and whether that is the reason for or the result of our widespread support for xenophobic foreign policy and an attitude worthy of Bishop Amaury when it comes to drone strikes and the rest of it, is I think a chicken-or-egg question.
It's an attitude that makes for noticeably bad drama, though -- the absence of any motivation beyond mustache-twirling evil, the lack of any sense that the bad guys are just folks like us convinced that they're the good guys themselves whose "hard choices" are fully as justified as those of our own in-story avatars, makes for threadbare villains and also a lack of any real stakes in the adventure. There's no chance that anyone will make a heel-face turn -- or if they do, it will seem to come out of nowhere and have no moral weight, no emotional impact -- if they're all paper-thin cutouts wearing black hats out of stock art.
But we see this directorial choice -- and the resulting viewer complaints in reviews and comments -- time and again, in Thor 2: The Dark World, in Iron Man 2, in Man of Steel, with character development and motivation sacrificed to big CGI spectacle and battle scenes.
Arguably, the old Talkies were heavier on those elements because effects were both more difficult and expensive -- but we're well past the point when the shiny newness of digital paint could be expected to wow creators no less than viewers, and serve as an excuse to indulge in CGI for CGI's sake, like the plotless wonders of early sound flicks that were nothing but strings of song-and-dance numbers, or "Now In Amazing Technicolor!" being a sufficient distraction from bad acting and worse writing. It's an excuse, a cover for the absence of quality scripts and thespian portrayals, and it is increasingly not working, when words like "hollow" and "disappointing" become a constant audience chorus.
The creative team at Dreamworks looked at the 1956 Ten Commandments and asked themselves, What new and interesting things can we bring to it?
The answers they came up with were, in no particular order, higher personal stakes for the main characters, a visual setting that explicitly rejects the whitewashing of Old Hollywood -- though the voice actor casting admittedly did not match up in that regard -- and an even greater humanization of all sides of the conflict, mostly accomplished by tiny wordless vignettes and body language -- some of which was admittedly if belatedly present all the way back in the 1923 version, with the scenes of lost children hugging dolls or struggling with baby goats in the chaos.
Also, somewhat incidentally, largely as a result of the choice of medium, a more seamless visual presentation and enhanced special effects -- but the awe-inspiring artistry of the panoramas in Prince of Egypt only endures because of the heightened emotional nature of the storytelling -- by some of the same talents responsible for Mulan and Brave, by the way -- which flows out of the narrative choice to make it a story of broken friendship, mutual perceived betrayal, and a brother-vs-brother war that should have been prevented before it got to one Plague, not ten--
The Prince of Egypt (1998) (Amazon instant video)
Oh -- and a highly-engaging soundtrack that doesn't stop the story for an uninvolved, artificial set-piece, as is so often the case with musicals, but which is intertwined with the action of the story to a degree that is almost operatic in its scope and emotive power:
None of us realized that what the Exodus story needed was musical numbers to engage our sympathies more completely -- until The Prince of Egypt went and did it, and upped the ante on the depiction of the Plagues by explicitly contrasting the anguish of the two antagonists until they are indistinguishable from each other, literally mirroring each other as their faces merge into two sides of the same tragic/heroic Leader --
And thus we see too how "manly" strength becomes a fatal weakness, the one brother's "tragic flaw" of hubris making him incapable of cutting their lossse, while the other's apparent weakness, his self-doubt, his reluctant pursuit of this war and constant refusal to suppress his more-"feminine" feelings of grief and empathy, leave him the stronger one in the end -- the reed that bends, and survives, rather than the tall but inflexible tree that falls in the storm!
There is something terribly subversive in this "children's cartoon," by declaring that this archetypal conflict is in fact a civil war and equally a tragedy, no matter the good outcome, nothing in the sufferings of the Egyptians to cheer at any more than in the sufferings of the Hebrew slaves -- a heresy among far too many of the most progressive liberal Northerners, when it comes to nostalgic gloating and glorying over the imagined sufferings of the Confederates and a desire that they should have been even worse than they were, are exactly as cruel and xenophobic as the worst conservative cheerleaders of our wars against Iraq...
No, says The Prince of Egypt, there should have been another way, a better way, we should never have let it get to this point in the first place -- an eternal moral, when the Divine Intervention is indistinguishable from the fury of aerial bombardment (surely no coincidence that the fiery hail striking palm trees here looks very like footage of the Vietnam War) or the inevitable companions of War -- disease, famine, and mass casualties without any glory whatsoever, "just war" or not.
And this, too, is equally a valid addition to the canon, because how else did the line "Let my people go!" enter into the wider popular culture, long before "seder" entered the mainstream Christian vocabulary or Mr. DeMille ever picked up a bullhorn?
Simple:
When Israel was in Egypt's land
— let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
— let my people go!
— let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
— let my people go!
Go down, Moses,
way down in Egypt's land—
way down in Egypt's land—
Tell ol' Pharoah to let my people go!
It's a black Gospel song, set in a haunting minor key, sung here by the legendary Paul Robeson.
Because the story of Exodus took on two radically different meanings, in Western -- and especially North American -- Christianity, being co-opted as a complacent feel-good Origin Story by the white churches who saw nothing ironic or hypocritical in celebrating the tales of the Baby in the Bullrushes and the Ten Plagues and the Parting of the Red Sea in the pursuit of freedom from vile duress, while simultaneously oppressing their own Jewish neighbors by legal and extralegal means, and building their own national economy -- North no less than South, for where did the northern mills secure their cheap cotton? and the foundational institutions of Harvard and Brown university were funded in no small amount by the Triangle Trade.
And yet, the same story was taken again, and retold by those who were suffering slavery only different from that of antiquity in that it was no longer possible to attain a measure of social equality with purchased freedom -- as the recent film Twelve Years a Slave pointed out -- because it was now tied to race, something nominally linked with skin color but which proved to the endless consternation of white lawmakers to be an impossible distinction to maintain -- not least because white Christian slaveowners refused to refrain from raping their prisoners.
--Getting back to that opening claim of DeMille's, that adherence to a Decalogue-based religion would ensure a just, humane, peaceful society, as it were...
Somehow, there is something just a bit more authentic about African-Americans invoking this symbolism, than white community leaders putting scenes from the story in their cathedral windows, in the 19th century--
So a retelling of Exodus that is not equally as aware of the history of slavery in the "New" World as it is of the Holocaust is going to be both false, and (therefore) flat, lacking in any wider applicability, any cultural resonances that would give it artistic depth and meaning beyond the flaccid, empty ritual of a school Christmas pageant.
But we look in vain for any of this, in Ridley Scott's remake, and so we are still left wondering what on earth could be the rationale for such a production. In the next part (or should I say reel?) of this essay, other possibilities will be considered, starting with the much-vaunted -- and oh-so-risible -- claim of "historical accuracy"...
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