2008 Wasn't That Long Ago, Really

Soon to return to the mystifying mess that is Exodus: Gods and Kings, but the fascinating ongoing trainwreck that is Mortdecai provides yet another example of everything that is wrong with E:G&K -- the Entirely Unnecessary Adaptation/Remake That Entirely Misses The Point Of The Original Without Being Good In Itself -- which may shed some mutual light on the problem.

One of the stranger things about the reporting on this latest flop is the impression conveyed that Mortdecai represents something entirely new and different for studios Lionsgate and OddLot Entertainment, who co-produced it -- a retro-ish comedy with cartoonish action sequences -- as though this perhaps may explain why it fell flat.

And yet, this whole fiasco is extraordinarily reminiscent of another Lionsgate/OddLot production from a mere six years ago! It is certainly understandable that people would want to forget, or even obliterate from their memories, the nightmare fuel that was Frank Miller's adaptation of The Spirit, but it was real, it happened, it was a thing.

(Unfortunately.)

In 2008, The Spirit, based on an early influential noir superhero series by legendary comic book artist Will Eisner (for whom the industry award is named) was very much anticipated before it came out. Genre media sites were flooded with articles and discussions about what was known and speculation over what was not.

However, those who were familiar with and fans of the original books were excited but worried because of legitimate concerns as to how the material might be updated, its 1940's attitudes towards race and gender not wearing very well (although perhaps better than they could have been, given the era.)

They hoped that a new version would handle these aspects well enough that it would attract a wider readership who could appreciate what Eisner had done well, and of course pave the way to a long-lasting film series. And because Frank Miller had recently helped to make successful film adaptations of his own work, 300 and Sin City, the hopes were running rather high prior to its release.

Alas, they got Frank Miller either failing utterly to grasp what was good about the original stories and characters, or else acting out his professional insecurities towards a founding figure of his chosen field who was no longer able to object. He was certainly far beyond his competence in screenwriting and directing -- and strangely there was nobody involved in the production ready, willing, or able to tell him he was going off the rails, creating a gross, unfunny, cruel, ugly, and antiheroic mess that felt like a mockery of the original stories and audiences alike.

Said the Guardian's Xan Brooks:

As it stands, The Spirits runs for 103 minutes and spins its wheels for most of that. It's about a masked vigilante (Gabriel Macht) who wants to be Batman but apparently can't decide whether he's a dark, brooding angel of vengeance, like the Dark Knight, or a camp buffoon in the Adam West mould. Surrounding him on all sides are a gallery of two-dimensional femmes fatales, desultory hired goons and scenery-chewing villains. At one stage, Samuel L Jackson and Scarlett Johansson march onto the stage in gleaming SS regalia – presumably because they are, like, really bad dudes and this is what bad dudes do.

And so it goes, the film flitting endlessly, endlessly around its high-contrast, hyper-real urban jungle like a drunken tourist who has lost their way. Ostensibly, this urban jungle inhabits the same neighbourhood as the one Miller rustled up in Sin City, although this time the thrill has gone. The place looks a lot less dangerous, a lot less fun. It's like Times Square after the developers got at it.

The result was an outpouring of incredulous, horrified, "What the hell did we just watch?!" reactions from disappointed fans, and an expensive box office failure coupled with an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score of 14% by equally-dismayed critics, despite starring fan favorites Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson as villains -- the only people involved with it whose careers have recovered from the experience. The attempt to force a pretty face upon the public as a "Heartthrob Hero" or "It Girl" often backfires, and this was no exception, although Gabriel Macht's fate has not been quite as grim as Legend of the Lone Ranger's Klinton Spilsbury.

There is also a strange parallel between Depp's Lone Ranger and The Spirit, in that both feature heroes of the "badass normal" variety, characters without technical superpowers who solve their problems with human skills and strengths (like Batman), who are both presumed to be dead in their original sources so as to go about their heroing adventures unimpeded -- and who were made really undead, or at least implied to be so (only without any of the unpleasant aspects of the condition!) in these updated versions to provide angst and invulnerability as character traits and motivators, just as Jack Sparrow was sort-of-undead-but-not-gross-like-Barbossa in Curse of the Black Pearl.)

For a reported production budget of $60 million -- something else that The Spirit and Mortdecai have in common! -- it brought in about $40 million, equally divided between US and international box office. It does not look like Mortdecai will come anywhere near The Spirit's take, and the only thing left is to see if Hollywood will learn from the contrast with Hunger Games series -- that bestselling or cult classic books, like older TV shows and movies, are popular for good reasons and throwing all those reasons away while retaining the name alone will only alienate the core audience without attracting a new one.

But since Lionsgate and OddLot Entertainment seem to have forgotten the events of less than ten years ago, it is difficult to be optimistic about their ability to learn anything, let alone the obvious lesson from this!

However, it is beyond comprehension that the entertainment media should also have forgotten that previous disastrous partnership, with no mention of it being made at the initial announcement of the forthcoming Mortdecai in 2013:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/lionsgate-oddlot-sign-multiyear-financing-632474

http://deadline.com/2013/09/lionsgate-oddlotink-deal-financing-distribution-591410/

I wonder if any will bring this up in the weeks to come? Or are we doomed to see a Groundhog Day-style revisiting of this disastrous adaptation of an old book by the same companies, six years from now?

Exodus: Gods & Kings recreated nothing -- so what was it doing instead?

To anyone with at least a 5th-grader's enthusiastic appreciation for Ancient Egyptian culture, the oft-repeated claims that at least Ridley Scott and his production team put a lot of effort into recreating the splendour of the New Kingdom on the big screen are simply laughable.

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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

And Forbidden Planet -- also from 1956 -- is supposed to be grim and grey; but even so, it has luminosity and texture. And it is relevant, because it's the direct linear ancestor of all the "away-team" stories of Star Trek -- but also of the (related) "haunted house/monster movie IN SPACE!" genre, where the obvious danger comes from ancient alien technology but the greatest threat is psychological rather than simply physical and the true enemy lies within -- in other words, it's directly responsible for Alien, and thus for the failed prequel-or-maybe-not of Prometheus.

(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!"

"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.