From the very first publicity stills and trailer footage showing horseback riders (!) in full armour (!!) waving big phallic swords (!!!) at each other in what was supposed to be a reenactment of the Battle of Kadesh, this was a facepalm-worthy notion.
Egyptian armies wore short kilts and heavy sandals, not full-coverage mail with Greek-style greaves and breastplates! We know this because they made lots of pictures and dioramas of their armies.
Where were the khopesh blades, those distinctive curved weapons that practically defined Egyptian warfare? Why were the Egyptians and Hittites dressed like Crusaders of several thousand years later, and how were they using military technology -- cavalry saddles -- and techniques -- fighting from horseback -- that wouldn't be developed for almost a millenium (and far to the north, not arriving in Egypt until much later) in the first place? In short: WTF, Ridley Scott? Who are you trying to fool here?
Yes, I know that Scott found a tame Egyptologist to claim that mounted cavalry was A Thing then, if somewhat exaggerated in number for the movie -- to which all I can say is, Citation Needed! and also No.
This is, in terms of relative absurdity, rather like having Hawker Harriers at the Battle of Britain. It completely breaks the suspension of disbelief for anyone who has the slightest familiarity with ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern art or the history of equitation -- but then everything shown in the first fifteen minutes was so far away from anything remotely resembling New Kingdom Egypt that clearly this was even less of an object than it was for Cecil B. DeMille.
And DeMille's variances from the historical record were always, as remarked before, in the service of greater visual impact and heightened drama, using anachronistic or unhistoric hues in costumes for thematic symbolism, and at least trying to make it all look like things you'd see in a museum or on a tomb fresco, for The Ten Commandments -- just as his actors all at least tried to act with appropriately regal bearing or convey at a bare minimum that they came from a culture and way of life that was very different to our own, so as to point up the sharper similarities.
So we must either assume that Sir Ridley along with everyone who works for him is simply incapable of seeing the blatantly obvious -- of not noticing that straight blades were confined to daggers and that swords were hooked, or that nobody in an Egyptian battle scene is wearing full armour (the reason that that crossover-wing breastplate is always used for Pharaoah in these movies is because that is literally the only visual evidence of an Egyptian wearing armour of any sort) and that you may search in vain to find anyone on horseback in Egyptian art -- or that they simply didn't care.
But why, then, make a movie purportedly set in Ancient Egypt? Why spend a fortune crafting armour for the "cast of thousands" that looked visibly out of place both in time and space, to everyone who has any knowledge of the subject? Why put the effort into designing a production with costumes that alternate between Greco-Roman, Medieval, and random fantasy-East with a few hilariously-misplaced dashes of Egyptian clip-art? (Why do this, and call it historically-accurate, instead of openly emulating the anachronistic High Fantasy free-for-all of Renaissance era bible paintings? That would certainly be a valid stylistic choice, if an eccentric one these days, and the honesty of it wouldn't leave us wondering what else they were lying about...)
I think the answer is that Ridley Scott is no longer trying to make movies as we understand them at all, and that -- like the increasingly incomprehensible string of films prior to it -- Exodus: Gods & Kings is an attempt to make a thinly-veiled political allegory of his own devising and pass it off as an historical picture. Which is also a valid artistic tradition, if one not much seen these days either any more than clouds full of fluffy pink cherubs overlooking famous historical figures -- but again, be honest about it!
I don't even think that criticism of religion -- while certainly part of it -- is the main point of Scott's efforts, and this is why even as a critique of religion it fails on all but the most sophomoric "raising questions" level...although his storytelling style is so inept that one has to question how much of that is due to failure-to-convey.
But if we consider that this was never meant as a Torah retelling, not even from a skeptical perspective, but a retelling of previous famous retellings of the Torah in order to attack and subvert their metatextual social and political messages -- then it begins to make a certain amount of sense...including the bizarreness of it all.
Because DeMille's Exodus retelling critiqued empire-building and racial/religious inequality, called out workplace sexual harassment and the whole notion of biology-as-destiny on multiple levels, held up human freedom as a primary value in a way that would have got him burnt at the stake for talking heresy during the centuries of European history when divine right was A Thing, and snuck an interracial romance under the radar in a way that only Classicists would get -- or anyone who paid attention to what he said in his own behind-the-scenes videos and went to look up Moses in Josephus, and tied that to Western uranium prospecting efforts in East Africa at the time -- all of which is glaringly obvious when you rewatch the the 1956 movie in contrast with the 2014 version. (The 1998 Dreamworks animated one as noted added a modern horrors-of-war sensibility and amplified the brother-versus-brother tragedy, but stuck in largest part to the DeMille storyline derived in part from Josephus and the Midrash.)
So what was Scott doing by making a ham-handed -- but CGI-shiny -- derivative of it? I think there were two goals, two primary targets, a higher one and a lower one, that he aspired to.
And it is important to remember that this was all his baby -- he came up with this project and let slip that he had been working on it for a while even before it was initially anounced, during the Prometheus promotions, that the then-unnamed Moses biopic was something dear to his heart in 2012 -- and rushed it through at an extremely fast pace while his fans were clamouring for news of a Blade Runner sequel.
We cannot blame this mess on poor dear helpless Ridley having something foisted on him by those higher than he -- the Robin Hood mess was of his own creation, choosing to meddle and re-meddle with a highly-acclaimed script (Nottingham) until it no longer resembled anything like a decent story, and feature his own darling Russell Crowe as the star no matter how laughably inappropriate he was for it.
Actually, the story as it eventually came out is even stranger than that: Scott bid on the Nottingham script but lost it to another studio, who cast Crowe for whatever incomprehensible reason -- who insisted that they get Scott to direct him, and thus between them they proceeded to tear a lauded and novel treatment of the old legend into unrecognizable shreds replace it with a mass of tired clichés (most of them stolen from his own back catalogue) with scriptwriter after scriptwriter doing revisions to ever-worse effect, blowing their budget to no return and burning bridges with Universal in the process.
But the lure of Scott's reputation insulated him from the usual consequences of hideous failure -- how many other people would be given huge budgets to play with and studio marketing and distribution, after so many bombs? Neither Body of Lies nor A Good Year came anywhere near breaking even on domestic returns.
And to be sure the gamble paid off respectably -- though not in fact spectacularly well -- for Fox with Prometheus, although I'm not sure if after the twofer of The Counsellor and Exodus: Gods & Kings there will be any bloom remaining on that rose.
But for the time being we can't simply accept the excuse that he wasn't allowed to make the (far better) hypothetical movie that he wanted to -- that he has less Hollywood clout than Terrence Malick or Guillermo del Toro or Angelina Jolie -- even given the long-ago Kingdom of Heaven fiasco. If he really couldn't tell that story in less than four hours he should have stuck to his guns like Malick always has -- but then again, if he couldn't tell it properly in more time than Branagh's Henry V (144-min theatrical runtime vs 137) maybe he isn't that good at his craft after all -- or needs a good editor to teach him how to film stories that aren't flabby. But at this point, it's clearly a lost cause -- he's making the movies he wants to, and nobody can teach him a thing.
The first attempted target of Exodus: Gods & Kings, I think, was to shoot down by overwriting in the popular imagination the earlier versions -- note that there has been strong speculation as to the connection between Scott's announcement of his Moses pic and Spielberg cancelling his own intended live-action Dreamworks version which would have been called Gods & Kings, the way that Scott's Prometheus led to the studio scuttling del Toro's planned At the Mountains of Madness as redundant, but I haven't yet seen anyone put 2 + 2 together to come up with the conclusion that Scott has a habit of stealing marches on other directors, despite the shenanigans he clearly pulled to get control of Nottingham and apparently also did earlier to replace director and lead actor on American Gangster -- a bit of returned favour/backscratching that Crowe may have come to regret (eat?) in the wake of Robin Hood.
Regardless, his boastful pre-release talk about how big and grand and important his version of the Exodus story was going to be, gives the lie to my facetious speculation at the start of this series that he was making such an abysmal movie to make other biblical epics look better. I think he may have believed -- despite all auguries! -- that the Batman-loving fanboys who fondly recall Gladiator and gave 300: Rise of an Empire its box office success last year, would flock to his obvious attempt to invoke all of the above this time.
They certainly marketed heavily to that audience, while blatantly neglecting religious blogs (reinforceing my belief that this was never intended as a religion-themed film, not even an anti-religious one intended to deconvert, rather than inspire, believers.)
This, in spite of loud, widespread fandom disappointment in Nolan's finale to the trilogy and growing disillusionment with Christian Bale's acting as one-note and that a growl, the lackluster reception of Robin Hood among fantasy-adventure fans -- I sure hope it's better than Robin Hood! being so frequently expressed in all the pre-release publicity responses, the severely-mixed reception of Prometheus and subsequent wariness voiced by even die-hard Scott fans concerning future science-fiction films by him -- all of which should have been a warning that massive numbers of that most coveted demographic, the young presumably-white males aged 18-29, might not in fact flock to theatres...let alone take Exodus: Gods & Kings to their bosoms to be rewatched fondly year after year around the family television-hearth, thus passing on his admittedly-incoherent message to future generations.
But can he truly have been totally unaware of all of this potential for disaster? Given how Scott has teased and taunted and interacted with fans over recent years, starting with all the lead-up publicity for Prometheus, it doesn't seem likely any more than it's likely he's unaware of the critical and box-office failures of the majority of his work since Gladiator (and far too much before that.) So if we assume he realized that popular victory was an unlikely outcome -- that he knew he was giving people what they didn't want, hadn't asked for, and wouldn't like once they tried it, like something out of a Fawlty Towers sketch -- why even bother?
And that I think is where we come to the alternate target -- which may have become his principle goal in life, since he certainly doesn't need the money (his net worth is reported at $140 million, as much as Hayao Miyazaki, Kenneth Branagh, and Guillermo del Toro's fortunes put together) or the publicity either -- and that would be Trolling his fans and the critics alike, because he can, because he doesn't care about his reputation, because he doesn't have any respect left for his audience.
After all, this is a man who has made no secret of his resentment of both sets of viewers for daring to prefer his older movies to his newer ones, for considering Ellen Ripley to be his most important creation, for thinking he did an infinitely-better job with the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story in Blade Runner than he has since any of his own original projects -- he commissioned the script for A Good Year from his neighbor in France so that he could film it in his backyard, and I would surmise that there was some behind-the-scenes pre-negotiation with Cormac McCarthy given the suspicious lack of any "Black List" type advance notice of the script before it was announced that Scott was going to film it -- and that he has done Sigourney Weaver no career favours and certainly no artistic ones for Russell Crowe since initially making them household names.
Audiences have not been shy over the years in criticizing his bizarre casting and narrative choices, or simply ignoring them which is even worse -- 1492 and Hannibal, and even post-director's-cut Kingdom of Heaven gets it with Orlando Bloom, vs. the collective Meh towards Matchstick Men and Body of Lies. So what does a man like Scott, a proud man -- and moreover a man who has never been photographed smiling except once that I've seen, and that was at a premiere where it looked like a rictus or a snarl, an attempt at making a human gesture by a Terminator robot that had never grasped it -- what does such a man do, when challenged by the hoi polloi?
Why, he doubles down, of course. He thumbs his nose at them, by telling them all exactly what he thinks of them and their criticisms in his next films, mocking them and killing them off in effigy, creating surreal political parables of what he thinks they (meaning we) think about the world and why we are wrong, and getting us to pay him for the privilege of being insulted.
Of course this is a game that you can only run for so long before the con wears thin, and I'm pretty sure that has happened for everyone now. When the Prometheus fan forums are calling for someone else (anyone else!) to direct the next installments of your own series, you've lost it. (Though I am sure that another studio will take a chance even if Fox decides that this is a straw too much on top of The Counsellor, because Hollywood studios learning from experience is a stretch of disbelief far greater than monsters or space-aliens or CGI miracles-that-aren't.)
But if you look at Exodus: Gods & Kings, and The Counsellor, and even yes Prometheus, as all being variations on a theme -- and that theme being a combination of Get off my lawn! and Things were better when... men were men meaning stoic remorseless hetero warrior types, and white men were in charge, and women and brown men and gays knew their proper places at our feet, and all you touchy-feely live-and-let-live liberal wusses have ruined it, RUINED it for the rest of us with your dismantle-the-Empire hogwash and tolerance and equality and graargh argh snargle bargh!!!
--it all falls surprisingly neatly into place. Many people have noted, over the past few years, both fans and professional critics, that there almost seems to be a level of parody or something weird going on, in Scott's recent work -- and I would say they are exactly right, except they don't trust their own senses enough (naturally enough, because it is a preposterous thing for anyone to do, to be sure) to accept that what he's doing is a sort of encrypted meta commentary on the twin themes of Kids These Days! (where "these days" goes back to at least 1945) and No More Of My Pearls ForYou Swine!
Or to put it another cinematically-referential way -- he's farting in our general direction and counting on prevailing winds to take the blame away from him, only the winds seem to have swung round at last.
And ridiculous as it seems as a premise, it has the Ockham's edge of not requiring us to accept that a legendary director with multiple awards to his name cannot tell that he is making movies that fail at being movies -- on the most basic levels, because I count every reviewer's admonition to only see a film on the big screen/in IMAX/3D as a declaration of cinematographic failure, an admission that the movie is framed and staged so poorly that none of its visual quality remains at a smaller size, a lower resolution.
When older movies -- like the 1956 Ten Commandments, or Casablanca, or the original Star Wars, or yes Scott's own creations, even the critically-panned 1492: Conquest of Paradise -- look better on the big screen, but still look great on the small screen, even as stills, even reduced almost to thumbnail size, and new films -- unfaded, undamaged, and filmed in HD -- look like mushy, incoherent mud in any other mode of viewing, something has gone badly wrong with the artform.
Just compare any frame or sequence in the critically-acclaimed Prometheus with classics like 2001, Forbidden Planet, or the 1953 War of the Worlds -- you can tell what is going on in each scene, the compositions are dramatic, and the colours, the light-and-shade contrasts glow off the screen despite the age of the films. By comparison, Prometheus looks like grey mud, sallowly tinted with emergency bulbs, even in its better scenes:
(It may look tranquil and lovely, but others thought so too...)
And Exodus fares even worse in terms of visually explaining the action or making vivid pictures, though it replaces the sulfurous charcoal of Prometheus with anachronistic sepia washes shot through with the occasional dash of colour, like a faded print of Gladiator.
I don't think this is accidental at all -- I think that Ridley Scott is deliberately insulting viewers, and making a statement thereby, in which he is declaring that we of the 21st century are a shabby lot, a poor copy of past greatness, an untidy rabble compared to his ancestors, who have doomed civilization by our insistence on individual freedom and rejection of the "glory" of the Empire on which the sun never set and its next-gen iteration the Pax Americana. (This goes along with his recent promotion of FOX luminary Bill O'Reilly's fictional histories.)
So in his Robin Hood, England is doomed by a young luxury-loving and uxorious king badly raised by his ineffective mother (surely the greatest cinematic slander on Eleanor of Aquitaine to date! matched only by the similar slander on William le Marechal) and only a hardened older -- but still vigorous -- real man can undo the damage to the nation with the support of a good woman before the villainous French invade, actual ethnicity of the Plantagenets aka Angevins be damned.
The bizarrely-ahistorical and much challenged replication of D-Day WWII landing craft out of wood for the climactic battle becomes less incomprehensible if we understand that what we're seeing is a sort of "Greatest Generation" fanfic mixed up with a bit of commentary on Edward VIII and his role in decreasing public reverence for the Crown and thus the whole edifice of the State and status quo with it. Russell Crowe is playing John Wayne as Winston Churchill sans cigar, and Cate Blanchett's initially-reluctant character coming around to his side with the band of Wild Boys show us how we ought to have behaved in the post-war past, instead of rejecting the Raj and him with it.
It's a parable of modern folly as Scott understands it that hinges on contemporary "Anxious Masculinity" and old-fashioned xenophobia, and a love that cannot say its name except in conservative academic circles -- or BNP party meetings -- because even the Tories are publically accepting of the need for at least some social progress and admit that the Empire wasn't perfect, these days. But I don't think that it's simply the movie's uncontested artistry that makes Zulu one of Scott's favourite films.
(Why WOULD the Engineers have a giant Mask of Tragedy as the focus of their temple?)
The fact that even after that much-deserved box office fiasco, audiences and studios were still eager to let him try again with another big-budget epic is a testament to the power of Hope, but he did exactly the same thing with Prometheus -- a diverse crew of completely incompetent younger people goes to the mountain to seek knowledge and steal fire, aka technology, from the wise Old Ones, the Ancient creators of life on earth who thus might as well be the Olympian gods, sponsored by an old white man who foolishly goes along with this, handing his power over like Lear to his greedy, jealous, cowardly daughter and gay-coded foster son, in his own quest for immortality--
"He doesn't even LOOK like an old man!" "--I know! Why is he pretending to be a centenarian?"
It ends badly, of course, and that's the point -- when you let a bunch of black and Asian guys and white women who embrace (literally!) multicultralism and the whipped white boys who heed them run anything, be it an expedition or a nation, the result will be tragic disaster for the whole planet, "mere anarchy loosed upon the world."
(Where do cobras come from, after all?)
And, because of our naive self-confidence, we can't even understand why the Great White Fathers of the 19th century and earlier would be violently furious with us, if we were able to call them back from the grave to judge our works and what we've made of "their" creation. It's not even subtle!
"I knew El Aurens, and you, sir, are no Peter O'Toole!"
It's just such an audacious statement -- outside the aforesaid-confines of National Review, FOX News and BNP/UKIP get-togethers (not to mention sundry internet forums, some more mainstream than others, given that the casting of Idris Elba as Marvel's Heimdall to this day brings out far too many fanboys' inner Stormfronter and the idea of a solo superheroine movie causes no end of masculine angst) -- that most viewers who caught whiffs of it in Prometheus dismissed it as accidental or at least unconscious.
"Look, honey -- we're going to be descendents!"
But look again at the Prometheus stills, and contrast them to the Forbidden Planet imagery: we are obviously intended to see the "modern" version of this expedition as a slovenly, lazy, undisciplined bunch of self-interested slackers totally out of their depth by comparison:
To say nothing of the difference between the guarded ship in the older film, versus the two leaders of the Prometheus abandoning their station to go have (dubiously-consensual) sex off-stage, managing to combine racist and sexist stereotypes in a single moment of directorial fail:
(So that it comes as no surprise that unlike the C-57D, the Prometheus will meet the same fate as the Bellerophon, at least by the conventions of slasher movies -- whereas in Alien moral virtue wasn't bound up with sex and there was no question of anybody "deserving" their fate except for the traitor. How the mighty have fallen, etc.)
Well, as they say, "three times is enemy action," and we are up to at least four now, depending on when you start counting. (I suspect that 1492: Conquest of Paradise with its sanitizing of the character of Columbus through the revisionist externalizing of his self-admitted atrocities onto a villainous Spaniard ought to be counted, and not simply as a precursor of the now-routine extended title: now with punctuation!)
The fact that nobody likes his fables any more, let alone gets them -- well, to an old cane-shaking crank revelling in his self-appointed status as unheeded Cassandra, a man who no longer needs money or fame and has no respect for his public, that's just gravy. He gets to cackle "I told them so! But they were too stupid to understand!" and get paid megabucks for it, as he literally declares: "Apres moi, le deluge!"
But wait -- isn't the point of Forbidden Planet that we need to understand our own shadow-side and deal with our aggressive impulses properly instead of masking them under old-fashioned formal courtesy and pretense until they break out and kill us all in a global war -- again, only this time with technology we can neither fully control nor comprehend, let alone resist? Possibly with a bit of anti-colonial commentary therein--
(I'm not saying it's Thermonuclear Warfare, I'm just saying it's PROBABLY Thermonuclear War...)
And isn't the moral of the story that the old father's jealousy and pride are deadly even to those he cares about, and must be fought to the death in a symbolic battle against our own "dark side", that only comprehension of others -- even others so extremely alien as the long-lost architects of this empty world (which can be read as a need to study history lest we be doomed to repeat it one last time) -- can help us break the cycle of destruction, and that a vanished utopia full of seething-but-denied hatreds wasn't really a utopia at all?
Well yes, and I agree that Scott's attempts at parable-making are severely muddled by his incoherent narrative building -- as well as the fact that, as Sir Terry Pratchett would say, he is battling against the forces of Story itself -- and this leads to the impression that he has totally missed the subtexts of these classic films for the shallow surface imagery of a bunch of square-jawed clean-shaven white guys doing manly things in them to the admiration of a pretty girl--
-- that he didn't notice that the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter was a Voice of Wisdom for all her unworldliness and that military might is utterly helpless against the unfathomable power of the Monster from the Id, that the soldiers can only triumph when one makes himself vulnerable in self-sacrifice to understand the Aliens--
(Everyone ELSE in the scene sees it, of course.)
Or that he simply didn't see that the black Princess was introduced as a potential royal bride for The Hero far superior to the white Princess, let alone the allusion to uranium in her gift of a jewel to Moses, and still less the more direct references to the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, by subjecting his manly hero to chains and loss of privilege because of his race--
It rather looks that way, because Scott can't totally manage to make his characters unsympathetic no matter how he wishes to -- which, again, is the sign of a bad director subjecting his storytelling to his ideology, whereas Cecil B. DeMille is explicit in his behind-the-scenes video that even his great villain Ramses is sympathetic and has admirable qualities -- in large part because his Prometheus actors were just too good for the humiliating material he inflicted upon them, leading to most viewers instinctively rewriting the movie in their minds to reflect this._
. But mainly I think that he just disagrees with them, and is challenging the symbolism and tacit challenges to 1950's mainstream ideals of conformity and hegemony by holding up ambivalent mirrors to the West under the guise of "Long Ago & Far Away"...
"Are we supposed to be playing 18th-century Rakes, or 21st-century Hipsters?"
"Damfino, Old Bean. The director certainly doesn't!"
"Damfino, Old Bean. The director certainly doesn't!"
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