Cecil B. DeMille himself, with prop replica stone tablets, from the original trailer
(Credit: © 1956 Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Pyxurz)
(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.
The new version feels old -- another thing that keeps coming up in reviews -- because it's deliberately done in a retro style...but when DeMille was working, whether in 1923 or 1956, he wasn't trying to make something old and fusty, but to bring the old tale to vivid new life.
If anything, it's a sort of parody of DeMille's aesthetic, rather than a genuine homage. At best it's a very confused, misfiring homage to what was cutting-edge cinema in its day -- and remains impressive, especially according to those who have had the good fortune to see a restored print on the big screen, the "way it was intended" to be seen.
So if the artistry isn't radically diffferent in any sense -- the ability to duplicate 400 frogs into 1000 times that number via Adobe in post-production isn't a huge jump in being able to turn three wooden sticks into real live cobras via compositing -- and the storytelling is only different for the worse, what is left?
History
One suggested answer is "historical accuracy," something tossed about a lot in pre-release discussion of the movie, but not much in evidence in the trailers and posters to Egyptologists -- or even to those of us who just loved Egyptian art and myths and read everything we could about it from the time we were first able to read!
"Why does Moses' costume look Byzantine? Why is he wearing Roman eagle motifs? It's not like it's hard to find examples of authentic Egyptian ones!" are the sort of informed complaints that come up in discussions of the movie, and likewise surprise at the utterly-anachronistic use of saddle-horses by Mediterranean cavalry -- to say nothing of the millennia-premature invention of the stirrup!
No, hand-cutting lots and lots of little bits for scale-mail doesn't make a production more authentic, when scale-mail is wrong for the time and/or place! Vast amounts of money are clearly not enough to avoid making howlers of the sort that would have been excusable in an old movie that was rushed to production in a short time, and without easy access to the latest in archeological discoveries -- but not since.
None of the armour, weapons, jewelry, and household utensils in the film look like anything but what a reasonably-well-produced local medium-sized stage company could throw together on a moderate budget, based on imagery taken from video games and other movies about ancient Egypt rather than good archeological references.
It's hilarious to see the few positive reviews declaring that the artifacts in the film look like they could come right from the British Museum -- I've been to the British Museum, seen the Rosetta Stone and the "Mask of Memnon" and the gold coffin of the Chantress of Amun, and the objects in Exodus: Gods and Kings look wrong for the era and wrong for the materials they're supposed to be made from, too. Real gold shines differently, real metal has a different heft, even in pictures, and I can excuse the wrong sort of fabric and fake finishes in a movie generations older than I am -- but not a modern big-budget film with delusions of accuracy.
"Okay, but accurate to what?" you might say, and that would be a legitimate question, if you're taking the view that Exodus is a myth, not a history as we understand the term to mean today but a story that was always told to illustrate a moral point, and so any attempt to pin it down to a real time period is a mistake. ("Interrogating the text from the wrong perspective," one might say!)
Which is fine, that's a perfectly valid way of doing biblical dramas from a narrative perspective -- in fact it's pretty much the default tradition throughout history right up until the late 19th century started worrying about archeological correctness -- except that isn't what E:G&K does at all, at least not on the surface. They pick a real, historical, documented royal family and frame the Exodus story around them -- you might as well put a disco ball in The King's Speech, and bell bottoms, and an iPod -- and then throw in a Hawker Harrier for good measure. Because that's how anachronistic mounted cavalry using stirrups is, in a movie about 19th Dynasty Egypt (factoring in the accellerated pace of military technology, of course.)
There's an old joke about how any would-be world conqueror needs to have a six-year-old child on staff to vet any plans of conquest for stupid mistakes -- well, Ridley Scott needed a horse-crazy eleven-year-old who saved up all their allowance money to purchase the Tutankhamen Exhibit catalog, to go over his production design and screenplay before getting too far into it. It would have saved a lot of embarrassment, although not necessarily doing anything for the plot.
On the other hand, it might -- not three minutes into the movie we have one of those howlers that makes it seem like nobody involved ever read a single book about "Daily Life in Ancient Egypt" let alone studied any of the detailed information we have on Egyptian religion and spirituality from their many surviving inscriptions and illustrations. Or bothered to check what species of fauna lived along the Nile in the time of the Pharaohs, before ever Alexander set foot there, either in scientific reference or simply by spending a lot of time looking at ancient Egyptian wildlife art -- of which, again, there is an awful lot!
Because Ridley Scott seems to think that "Late Imperial Rome" and "New Kingdom Egypt" are interchangeable when it comes to religious belief and practice and bird life, so we see a generic "High Priestess" (of what god or goddess?) reading the entrails of a big dead white waterfowl.
(Classics majors may all collectively facepalm along with Egyptology fans, now.)
I thought it was a swan at first glimpse, which is a problem on multiple levels starting with the fact that swans weren't around in Ancient Egypt (ducks and geese are the waterfowl shown in extreme detail in Egyptian tomb paintings, and they weren't white) but it's worse than that, because upon closer examination of the footage, it turns out to be a Pekin duck -- a very large, pure white duck that didn't exist in the Mediterranean three thousand years ago because it's a domestic breed created less than two thousand years ago in China.
But that's a small problem (if typical!) compared to the fact that Egyptian priestesses weren't haruspices, either. Babylonians studied the entrails of sacrificed animals -- mainly sheep and cattle -- and so did the Etruscans, and the Romans after them.
Northern Mediterranean diviners studied the behaviour of birds to predict the future -- that's where the word "augur" comes from -- but I looked in vain for clearly-documented examples of ancient people studying bird livers for signs of Fate.
The Egyptians, on the other hand, specialized in star-reading and dream-reading -- both things which are familiar from, again, our cultural history of bible stories! How did Joseph get to be important in the first place, after all? "Seven fat years and seven lean years," remember?
As for the Pharaoh's blood-tasting thing -- I don't even know where that comes from.
Sekhmet, the Lioness whose statue is shown in the movie, was indeed the primary war-goddess and protector of Egypt -- and the Pharaoh himself, when at war, was described as her living avatar in hymns and poems, particularly by virtue of being an archer. But she was worshipped with libations of beer (and later, wine) as symbolic of blood -- human blood, that is, and the legend that her indiscriminately-destructive wrath as the avenging executioner of the All-Father, Ra, was appeased with the substitution of alcohol. Bird blood has no role that I have ever read of, in the rituals of the Two Lands -- although it can be seen as a sort of invented parallel/predecessor for the lambs' blood in Passover tradition, I suppose.
So right there is a clear indication that Ridley Scott didn't care enough to do even the most basic research on ancient Egypt, before setting an entire full-length film there, meaning accuracy was never even on his mind.
This is where it gets funny, and a little bit strange -- because both the 1998 cartoon and the 1953 live-action versions at least tried, and tried hard, to have if not a dead-on accurate rendition of dynastic Egypt, still something that was first, recognizeably "Egypt" to audiences at a glance, and second, really had the look and feel of ancient artifacts, even if exaggerated or changed so as to look more theatrical in performance.
The huge "basalt" throne of Pharaoh in DeMille's movie isn't a match for anything ever discovered that I know of -- but it looks eerily like real basalt Egyptian sculptures that I have seen, in its massiveness and in the smooth stylized lines, even while it looks equally like the Art Deco Egyptian sculptures that Tutankhamun's tomb inspired -- a staged reality, but one that while larger-than-life still has a real care for the underlying inspirations.
(And DeMille tried to show the Egyptians as reverent and pious towards their own gods, with rituals filled with dignity, no less, while the somewhat more cynical, stage-magicky take in Prince of Egypt nevertheless meshes with ancient Greek and Roman stories about Egyptian special-effects chicanery being used to thrill the peasants and tourists with on-demand miracles, and special secret knowledge that their clerics kept for themselves. But the idea that they didn't believe in their gods at all, that the god-kings of the Two Lands and their annointed heirs acted like snickering 20th century altar boys at church, is nowhere to be found in either movie -- or, indeed, in history!)
Ridley Scott's ancient Egypt, on the other hand, looks like someone went through a Dover clip-art book and just pasted imagery together without regard for scale or suitability or anything, and then sprayed gold paint all over it. And what, indeed, is that mess on the head of the "High Priestess," I ask you? Hair? Feathers? It isn't like we don't have good paintings and sculptures showing what Egyptian clerics wore to work! But what to expect, from a movie where a New Kingdom Pharaoh is shown wearing the Vulture Crown of the reigning queen made famous by depictions of Cleopatra, as a war helmet?
Again, in respecting what we actually know of what Egyptian royalty wore in what context, DeMille's almost 70-year-old remake of his own earlier treatment of the story is hands-down superior in all respects to Scott's.
And even in the admittedly-lacking 1923 version, the right people are wearing the right type of headdresses, and the architecture looks good -- much better than E:G&K, where the distinctly-off proportions of the columns are like a thorn in the sandal, to anyone with even an amateur knowledge -- meaning a deep if unfunded love -- of Egyptian art.
Worse, the fact that the color palette is practically identical to that of Gladiator makes it both drab and inaccurate: ancient Egypt was covered with bright paint and shiny surfaces -- real precious metals and gemstones when possible, and glossy ceramic imitations when cost was a concern. There is a lot that hasn't survived and which must be guessed at, when it comes to household furnishings, but archeology research in the realm of materials and textile technology has yielded a great deal of information about what things were made of and looked like, in the ancient world. You can't go wrong with cinnabar red, lapis lazuli and turquoise, that's for sure.
But even more drabness and dullness comes from the fact that there aren't any people in his ancient Egypt -- there are a couple of grinning, slouching, anachronistic fratboys who don't take their roles seriously at all, a pompously-wooden old father figure, far less alive than any wooden statue from any dynasty that I've ever seen in any museum, and a bunch of faceless, voiceless masses.
The Ten Commandments gave the bystanders and secondary characters -- even the redshirts! -- more personality, even in the silent version that runs less than an hour long, while The Prince of Egypt did the same, with so many wordless vignettes -- and also showed a pair of Egyptian spear-carriers as either traitors to their losing side, fleeing the sinking ship -- or disillusioned men finding a renewed loyalty to their former prince -- and joining the mass Exodus to lend their strength to the struggling refugees.
It would be incredibly easy to make a much more historically-resonant and the most emotionally charged version yet, by simply investing into the screenplay so much more of what we now know (or knew then, but only in scholarly and obscure sources) about ancient Egyptian beliefs and ethics. Because the prayers, hymns, and religious instructions that remain from as far back as the Old Kingdom, celebrate the virtues of Mercy, Honesty, Generosity, Justice -- these are the things that will gain a happy eternity in the next world at the Judging of Hearts, and their opposite, what will get the perpetrator thrown to supernatural monsters instead.
There is just so much that is clearly part of a shared tradition, in the moral writings of ancient Egypt and in the Torah alike, and so many things in the Book of Exodus that reveal how much of Egyptian folk religion pervaded the adjacent Jewish culture -- the "brazen serpent" that Moses made to heal the sick (and which became apparently an object of worship itself in Jerusalem) like the staff that becomes a serpent earlier in the story, and the Golden Calf itself, are both simply examples of the common religious symbology of the ancient Near East.
So an even better irony and contrast, in making a parable for 21st century audiences from the Exodus narrative, would come out of showing how both sides believed exactly the same things -- not when it comes to ritual and the form of the Divine, no, but when it came to what people were supposed to do, in regards to treating each other decently, in the name of their deities there was no appreciable difference -- except the difference between principle and practice, which comes from not seeing some people as people, from seeing one's self as always in the right, and being willing to make personal exceptions for rules that are too inconvenient.
Ancient Egyptian poetry provides strikingly contemporary-sounding examples of people complaining about rampant dishonesty, government corruption, hypocrisy, violence, and greed -- and the despair and depression they feel in response to it, or the fact that individual love and family closeness provide an alternative to society's emptiness.
It could be so powerful -- showing more-or-less ordinary people's lives, the high-ranking lady in charge of a clothing factory complaining that the servants she's been assigned aren't competent to do the work in her absence, the childless couple trying to find a legal loophole to prevent their loathed biological families of origin from getting their hands on the estate no matter which of them predeceases the other, the unambitious college kid whose parents are upset that he is spending all his money on beer -- all based on real ancient writings!
And then, contrasting them with the sweatshop workers making fabric for their "betters" and the housekeeping staff of the family with the legal drama keeping it all going with no more regard than a broom or a rake, the "poverty" of the student's family contrasted with the manual labourers in the markets and fields whose existence they only consider when talking about where he could end up, if he doesn't do well as a scribe!
But that, as a backdrop to the political-by-way-of-religious drama of the Exodus story, would be too disturbingly on-point, too radical, too much savouring of Liberation Theology for "liberal" Hollywood, existing as it does in Southern California, where it would say far too many things about the wealthy white establishment's relationship to the Latino population -- and that even before the script pointed out that the Hebrews had once been welcomed immigrants to this land!
I mean, it would be really too silly to tie it into the story of Joseph and his jealous Brothers, the Coat of Awesome, the Dream of the Cows and the Grain, and the stolen Silver Cup, right? Or all the lines about not oppressing foreigners on account of how you guys were once foreigners in Egypt who got oppressed, remember?
Yeah, that sure wouldn't bring anything new to shake up the vibe of a many-times-told tale...
Ideology
So, if Scott isn't interested in using actual historical accuracy to add pizzazz to his film -- either in a fusty antiquarian sense of making sure that the visuals are spot-on, or using things we know about real -- not Hollywood -- ancient Egypt, to tell a more gripping and relevant story, what on earth is he even bothering with this project for? Why spend a fortune to do a bland restaging of someone else's original plotlines, if you're not even going to try to do it better?Well, another answer is ideology -- both DeMille and the creators of The Prince of Egypt were approaching the story from a place of lifelong personal affection and religious traditions, and wanted to do it respectful justice. But against that is the fact that they were also coming at the Book of Exodus from a 20th century humanism-influenced perspective, and as artists -- and we see both of these factors at work in the way that the films attempt to give reasonable motivations to all participants in the retellings, taking it out of the stark cryptic mythic frame, and in which changes are made from the original text.
Yes, changes -- so many people claim that The Ten Commandments was a "scripturally accurate" rendition, and yet it diverges from the source material repeatedly and significantly. In Exodus, Moses always knew his secret identity -- it wasn't a surprise to him at all, because his mothers were in on it together. That's canon. Aaron is his herald/spokesman, and the guy who does all the actual talking and most of the miracle-working, while Moses stands back, apparently too lofty -- but actually too shy and poor at public speaking to handle the task, again according to canon.
So the 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments made two drastic changes right from the start, to insert psychological drama in that moment of horrific revelation -- I am not who I always thought I was! so who am I? -- and to make the main character look a lot more important to modern eyes, because ancient audiences might have seen a social parity in Moses showing up and having his own PR person doing the talking for him, just as an ancient king would, but today it would just look weak, although if you could pull it off, it would be very funny to contrast the social expectations of the Egyptian court with the nerdy behind-the-scenes reality of Moses having freakouts and social anxiety. There's just a little of it left, when Moses commands Aaron to throw down his staff for him, making it clear that he, too, has an entourage just like the other ambassadors -- but the subversive aspects and implications of sending an unqualified, self-doubting prophet to challenge a superpower are no longer present.
That he and the younger Pharaoh were raised together as brothers is also not explicitly stated, although it certainly isn't an unwarranted extrapolation from the text, and he's never presented as a warrior in the Torah, although it's certainly plausible that, as someone passing as an Egyptian nobleman, he would have been trained in the use of weapons.
And all the other scenes, the romantic rivalry between Moses and Ramses (who again is not given that name, or any name, in the Book of Exodus!) and the Joshua-Liliah-Dathan mess and the specifics of the city-building and the byplay of the royal court -- all of that is pure fictional invention, to give us some reason to care about these characters and show us some backstory, some context for the grand-scale political and theological events. (And a whole lot of other, weirder, bits are omitted from the film, such as the "Bridegroom of blood" sequence! along with the constant repetition in the textual Plagues sequence, which works from a read-aloud angle but would just be tedious if played out exactly on stage -- or worse, ridiculous -- In come Moses and Aaron again, everyone says exactly the same things with the different Plague switched out, out they go again...)
So already there is no cultural problem with changing biblical canon radically in the interests of storytelling -- The Ten Commandments did it one way, and then The Prince of Egypt did it partly the same and partly a diferent way -- so long as it results in a story that has equal measures of suspense and empathy-grabbing and emotional impact.
Only the changes in Exodus: Gods and Kings failed to do that, and dramatically so, when compared to the far-superior scripts in the older films.
One of the fascinating things that the 1956 Ten Commandments does, when considered as being simultaneously a work of faith (DeMille, who was in deep denial about his own Jewish parentage, reportedly read his Bible every day -- which somehow didn't make him personally any less of an asshole, which again ought to have given him pause before proclaiming the Decalogue a panacaea for all social ills) and as a work of narrative art, is to try to root it in reality by having not simply given the bad guy a name and a face out of history and a personality out of all of fiction, but by bringing in the outside world, as well: we are introduced to other nations from our schoolbooks in the throne room scene, where emissaries from Troy and Ethiopia show up to represent other world powers of antiquity.
This is, as I said, fascinating, because while Ethiopia is mentioned a lot in the Bible, and has influential roles in both Jewish tradition and Christianity (for instance the European name Candace, from the Ethiopian royal feminine title) you will look in vain for any glimpse of the topless towers of Ilium. And many other, documented allies of Egypt played much larger roles both in the scriptures and in history -- Babylon, for one! So DeMille is making a statement, or several statements, by doing so.
But what are they? A very good question, with much more complicated answers the more one looks at it.
As most people know, for many centuries Troy was thought a legend, a fictional city like Atlantis or Oz, until -- as the official modern myth goes, the amateur Heinrich Schliemann went and looked for it a hundred-some years ago and finally discovered it, by following the leads given in the Iliad.
In actuality it was more complicated than that, there were other archeologists looking for it, Schliemann's methods were questionable and the simple feel-good story of an outsider challenging the orthodoxy and proving the legends were real isn't that simple at all -- Troy survived lots and lots of wars, just like Rome over the millennia, and the stories in the Homeric epics can't be neatly matched to the archeological discoveries.
So is DeMille trying to say that Exodus is, or is not, myth? Since Troy, the city, turned out to be a real place after all, one could argue that this is the significance of including emissaries from that kingdom in the story -- but then, wouldn't that imply that the Olympian gods were just as real as Yahweh? Is DeMille trying to nail down "the" Trojan War, but demark it as somehow a false, because "pagan", epic contrasted to the "true" supernatural epic of monotheistic tradition? A swaggering "Our beliefs are the only correct ones" declaration in skeptical modern times, bolstered by apparent fact?
Especially since he locates the movie's Troy specifically in that Homeric frame, by making them ambassadors from the court of King Priam, thus placing them all in a strange mix of real, well-documented history (the reigns Seti and Ramses II) and two widely-separated oral traditions written down long after the events they describe were supposed to have taken place, in vastly different cultural circumstances from those eras.
Or is that the intention, to denote the events of The Ten Commandments as taking place in a legendary intersection of real and mythic narrative, and thereby to frame it as a story being retold for modern audiences, rather than as a pretense of documentarian filmmaking?
I tend to suspect the latter. No matter how personally devout DeMille may have been (and he is reported to have read his Bible daily) he had to have known that he was changing the Scriptures to make them tell a more dramatic and humanist tale, in both versions -- and doing so in response to the fact that he did live and work in the 20th century, and all its dynamics. While the 1956 production feels much more like the archeological survivals of ancient Egypt, it is by no means accurate when you look closely at it -- no matter if DeMille filmed on site and got local granite for his stone tablets!
Those fabric colors in the costumes are nowhere to be found in depictions of New Kingdom aristocracy -- and sure, you could argue that the paintings were just conventional and didn't reflect real fashion trends, and you might be right, but the point is, the colors look both good on screen, and right for the particular characters. It's artistic license for dramatic effect, just like the mashup of styles from different eras in Nile Valley history, and it works -- if you're treating it as a theatrical production, not an archeological diorama.
This is particularly obvious when you look at how the Trojan envoy is dressed -- straight out of a Renaissance fantasy of ancient Greece, not with anything resembling archeological discoveries of Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean cultures like Mycenae, legendary home of King Agamemnon from the Iliad and also excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. It's glaringly wrong -- if this was supposed to be historically accurate.
However, the Trojan ambassador shows up with the specific and sole in-story function of pointing out the existence of the Silk Road, and thus to serve as a way of interjecting China into the storyline without it being entirely out of place. In other words, while no single bit of it is historically accurate -- even by the standards of 1956! -- it is rooted in history, in the sense of showing awareness a wider world stage beyond the little spotlight of the central tale, in a way that most Bible storybook versions fail at even today.
So in the height of the Cold War, audiences are suddenly taken out of their cozy "long ago and far away" trance (assuming they hadn't already been by the whole post-WWII, ongoing Civil Rights Era significance of a story that starts with notes of genocide and racial inequality) by the reminder that the other side of the world existed even then, and had commercial contact with "the West," even in that time of limited technology, and that no history or parable which ignores that can be valid or meaningful.
Was that exactly what DeMille was trying to do in that scene -- which also dramatically serves as foreshadowing as the bolt of red fabric is explicitly compared to the waters of the as-yet-unbloodied Nile -- or was it more of an instinctive attempt at relevance? We who weren't there then can only guess, but that's what it does, and nothing in the film appears to be careless or accidental.
This goes even more for the inclusion of envoys from Ethiopia -- which as used by ancient Mediterranean writers was an inclusive term for a much larger territory than the modern nation's borders today, generally referring to parts of southeast Africa that at the time would have been called Nubia or Kush (not to be confused with Kush in India) or Aksum and now are Sudan and Eritrea, and thus entirely anachronistic, even more so than linking Troy and Egypt -- which at least is something that the ancient Greek playwrights did before, with fanon stories about Helen and Iphegnia ending up secretly in that land through the agency of the gods, to give at least some of the Homeric victims happy endings and closure.
(Only it turns out that they're almost canon -- that DeMille took the persona and role of enemy-turned-ally Princess Tharbis from the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, and thus snuck an interracial relationship under the radar, because in that old oral-tradition-based fanfic of Exodus, she becomes Moses' first wife and their romance is what ended the war...)
The Ethiopian party is dressed anachronistically, too, with a fantasy-19th century look based as much on 1930's pulp illustration as on real East African traditional garb -- Nubian and Cushite clothing styles look like Egyptian ones, in most of the ancient carvings and paintings I've seen, although sometimes using fabric colors other than plain white. But feathers, as in Egyptian fashion, were limited to plumes adorning crowns.
Again, there is no way this fact could have been overlooked, even in 1956, by a movie maker insistent on his archeological grounding as key to the film's intrinsic validity. So it, too, must be symbolic -- the question as ever being what is this scene supposed to say?
It could be argued that putting diplomatic personnel from elsewhere in Africa, dressed very similarly to the Egyptian court, would be confusing (especially since the key historical distinctive feature, of white kilts and robes contrasted with dyed clothing, had already been lost in the production design) but it could just as well be countered that such a nod to archeological accuracy would have shown that Pharaonic Egypt was part of a broader regional sphere with common cultural exchange, the way that "togas" indicate a northern Mediterranean antiquity by a visual shorthand understood by everyone without getting into the differnces between chitons and himations and actual Roman garments.
So it seems as though this is another attempt to tie the distant, even mythic, past to a contemporary political world -- by alluding to the British empire, by reference to eastern Africa in a way that would invoke not the actual realms of antiquity but modern Kenya and thus the ongoing struggle of the colonized. Even the use of the name Ethiopia, biblical as it is, could hardly have failed to evoke Mussolini's invasion of that country within living memory, and so there is yet another tacit reminder of WWII, and the fact that fascism was not limited to a blight on Europe alone.
The depiction of an independent African kingdom whose representatives are clearly black, as less-powerful but still important players on the world political stage -- even in such a pulpy, clichéd "tribal" way -- in 1956 could not be anything but a political statement.
DeMille might or might not have wanted -- or even cared about -- diverse casting of lead performers himself, and certainly could not have gotten away with it in an era when interracial relationships couldn't even legally be depicted on-screen. But, by having on the one hand Heston's Moses outspokenly denounce racial bigotry while in chains himself, having been exposed as someone only "passing" as the majority ethnicity, and by having black actors who weren't just servants and spear-carriers in the background in a key scene on the other, he did take a daring stand, for the time, and lent a little validity to the old descriptor "Liberal Hollywood" that otherwise is hard to justify.
So why, when it is now 2014 and two of the biggest complaints about Ridley Scott's last big-budget spectacle were that he didn't give Idris Elba enough screentime and that Charlize Theron's characterization was badly served, would he produce a movie that does worse with ethnic diversity and female character representation than its predecessor from half-a-century ago?
When DeMille had a named WOC with a speaking part who played a brief but significant role in his film, "Homage to the original" as so often trotted out, doesn't work as an excuse for making a movie where only white guys get important things to do, when the original tried harder -- and succeeded better! not only in the feminine-driven storylines where mothers and sisters and girlfriends and wives are all far more important than fathers and sons, but with the casting of Asian-American Yul Brynner as the hero's charismatic nemesis, who is explicitly presented in the story as equally handsome and competent, desired and desirable by all who know both men as acquaintances, so that only those who know them intimately are aware of his moral flaws -- against the full weight of cultural and institutional opposition.
And as for Ridley Scott's blaming it on Spanish racism -- has anyone in the world of so-called journalism made the slightest attempt to verify this? Anyone bother to call up the SFC and ask them if it's true they wouldn't back a movie that had Paterson Joseph or Alexander Siddig or Oded Fehr or Naomie Harris or Sophe Okonedo as stars instead? Their contact information is right on the front page -- if my Spanish weren't at Sesame Street levels, I'd email Carlos Cobian myself!
http://www.spainfilmcommission.org/index/w,ca/
The closest I've seen has been random commenters pointing out that, aside from Bale, there are few big names in it and those there are, are mostly has-beens -- who'd heard of Joel Edgerton before Scott decided to make him a star? I had no idea who he was, until someone mentioned he'd had the utterly-forgettable role of a young Owen Lars in the prequel trilogy. And when was the last time that Ben Kingsley or Sigourney Weaver headlined a picture, or when did John Turturro -- or good grief, Aaron Paul -- ever?
(Here's a hint to those wise enough to take advice: giving multiple conflicting or mutually-exclusive excuses always betrays bullshitting. Anyone who's ever been in a relationship with someone who can't tell the truth about their own motives knows this far too well.)
But I think the true answer is the same as it is to the question of why did he choose to do a retelling that falls so flat, is such an undramatic dramatization of the Exodus legend from an artistic perspective on the one hand, and such an innaccurate and inconsistent one from a naturalistic, historicizing perspective, on the other?
And that is that he isn't trying to retell Exodus at all, but simply using the brand name, so to speak, as the hook to get studio backing for an allegory of his own devising which has nothing to do -- or very little, at least -- with the Torah, or history, or even with religion at all, just as he did with Prometheus and Robin Hood.
Because Prometheus doesn't make sense as a hard-sfnal drama like Alien, and it doesn't work as a "deep thoughts" take on the relationship of myth and faith and science, and it doesn't work as a thrilling old-fashioned scifi adventure, and it barely works as a "pretty pictures strung together with a meaningless threadbare excuse for a plot" either -- seriously, watch it on a small screen compared to, again, Alien or Aliens or the original Star Wars movies or the old Forbidden Planet.
They might lose a lot compared to the big screen, but the visuals are still quite striking, even beautiful at times -- even with the cheesy old-school special effects!
If a supposedly-dramatic movie can only be considered watchable in a theatre, it's a failure -- because ever since the 1950's, most movies have gotten their most viewings on the small screen, in our homes, without the benefit of HD or surround sound, even. A director working in 2014 has no excuse to be unaware of this, when that's how films like Casablanca and the Thirties versions of Robin Hood and The Wizard of Oz -- and yes, The Ten Commandments -- became beloved classics in the first place.
But Scott isn't making movies to entertain any more, assuming he ever was. He's making movies to spite, and to sneer, and to preach in cryptic, gnostic allegories at his audience, these days -- and the message he's trying to convey, or at least to express, whether or not he even cares if his fanboys "get" it, is that the past fifty years (and more!) of history have been a mistake, that the dismantling of the British Empire (and the Pax Americana) was a mistake, that turning away from the rule of the old white patriarchs has brought only ruin to the world -- the entire world, mind you, not just the world of white Anglo-American middle-class dudes -- and that all of us young people (meaning people younger than him) should get off of his lawn, get haircuts, real jobs, turn down our music and just stop with all this multi-culti Kumbaya-singing diversity already--
I didn't say it was a good message -- but I think that it both explains the artistic horribleness and apparent nonsensicality of his recent movies (this "message" also includes The Counsellor, by the way) and can be demonstrated by examining the symbolism of them in even closer detail, and contrasting it with the messages both implicit and explicit of the films they mimic on the surface.
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