‘Gods of Egypt’ Feels Like God’s Wrath (FILM REVIEW)

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I’ve long been an admirer of director Alex Proyas; often, even, an apologist. Both The Crow and Dark City were so influential to me in my formative years that I’ve stood up for him during his latter day stumbles. I defended Garage Days as a poignant tale of the lure of rock and roll on the minds of young dreamers; I’ve argued there’s no reason to defend I, Robot as it’s a classic in its own right, source material be damned; I contend that Knowing was underrated, suffering more from misunderstanding than from actual awfulness. All this time I’ve argued that he’s a director with visual flair, capable of creating emotional resonance in basic science fiction that quite often achieves greater heights than what is, at first, perceptible.

In the back of my mind, however, I worried I was wrong. Was I defending Proyas or justifying my love of The Crow and Dark City in the face of a series of grievous missteps that I might not forgive in another director? I kept these fears quiet over the years, even as evidence mounted that I was wrong in my adoration. But no more. Not after seeing Gods of Egypt.

Gods of Egypt is less a movie than a two-hour visual essay detailing all that is wrong with the state of Hollywood today. It’s an over bloated mess of poorly written characters navigating their way through ill-conceived plots amidst a sea of CGI that looks akin to the best graphics that Playstation 2 has to offer. Any hopes I might have had for the film were dashed from the opening moments, as an uninspired monologue droned on aimlessly, serving as the most appropriate tone setter for a movie as I have ever seen.

Drawing its inspiration from Egyptian mythology, Gods of Egypt weaves a tale of the pantheon of gods and their roles in humanity’s life. Jamie Lannist—I’m sorry—Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays the god Horus, an oversexed drunk set to take his mantle as King of All Egypt from his father Osiris (Bryan Brown) because why the fuck shouldn’t an unambitious lout with unquenchable thirsts for women and wine be in charge of everything? Meanwhile, local thief-with-a-heart-of-gold Bek (Brenton Thwaites) is busy stealing clothing and jewels for his lady fair Zaya (Courtney Eaton) for Horus’s coronation because who doesn’t love a criminal with a pretty smile? As Egypt gathers to celebrate their new unqualified king’s rise to power, Horus’s uncle Set (Gerard Butler) arrives with other plans. After killing Osiris and blinding Horus in battle, Set assumes his tyrannical, narcissistic reign and, sometime later, Bek must find Horus and join with him to make Egypt great again.

As a premise, it’s not unsound. There’s a reason that tales of gods and men survive long after the civilization that birthed them have crumbled and decayed. Myth has the kind of staying power that Hollywood executives can only dream of, so I can’t necessarily fault them for trying to cash in. If it’s worked for the last few thousand years, it should work today. Right? You’d think so.

The problems of Gods of Egypt are legion, but as with every movie it all begins and ends with the script. In this case, the movie was brought you by the same guys that brought you Dracula Untold and The Last Witch Hunter and their continued success as working screenwriters makes me rethink everything I thought I knew about career goals. Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are a team who’ve yet to write anything remotely resembling a quality film and yet they keep getting work. (Currently on tap are a remake of Lost in Space and a remake of Clue. Be afraid.) Never once have I considered that you can be so inept at your job and still continue to work. Never has it occurred to me that you can probably make the same living writing bad movies as you can with good movies.

If that’s the case, why the hell is anyone trying to write a good movie? Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Joseph Campbell or Robert McKee can achieve what Sazama and Sharpless have achieved here, which amounts basically to nothing. The formats and formulas are, at this point, so clear that the plot is telegraphed within the first ten or fifteen minutes. No effort is put into characterization or development; instead, they rely on a blind devotion to the path of the hero that makes for a relentlessly cheesy and stereotypical spectacle.

Proyas is the one responsible for turning it into the spectacle it is, however. As much as he’s working from god awful material, he shows little restraint as he attempts to find whatever the heart of this movie actually is. Our heroes move through massive CGI set pieces that grow harder to look at as the story progresses. The actors stumble around confused, never seeming sure if Proyas is trying to make something light and airy like Stardust or grim and gritty like The Two Towers. For that matter, I’m not sure Proyas ever figured that out either. Gods of Egypt is all over the map, tonally, and the film never quite settles into what it wants to be.

The cast is okay enough, though the concept of British actors portraying Egyptian gods raises a whole series of interesting questions that prove that Hollywood is as tone deaf as #OscarsSoWhite says it is. You could say that casting white actors as African gods is a veiled statement on the effects of European colonialism, but that would be giving Gods of Egypt a bit more credit than it’s due. That would require thought; that would imply subtext. Neither are present here.

No, the simple fact is that Gods of Egypt is a bad movie, and no amount of justification or mental gymnastics could ever make it anything but. It’s an uninspired and poorly conceived travesty from open to close. Shame on Sazama and Sharpless. Shame on Proyas. Shame on the Hollywood system that allowed this movie to exist. Never before has a single movie so embodied everything that’s wrong with the film industry as Gods of Egypt. Hopefully, that’s a mantle the movie keeps for a long, long time.

Gods of Egypt is in theaters now.