False Idols: GODS OF EGYPT

A big, lumbering, gaudy, gold-plated fantasy set in Ancient Egypt, Gods of Egypt is a modest collection of oddball flourishes buried under an explosion of convention and generic effects. It’s idiosyncratic in all the small details, but overblown and undercooked in the broad sweep of its tedious and predictable quest narrative. Behind this eccentric production is Alex Proyas, a director of blockbusters who brings such total commitment to his ideas that you have to admire the force of his personality shining through, no matter what you think of the end results. He’s given us the death-haunted pop Goth The Crow, the sci-fi noir Dark City, the popcorn tech ethicist actioner I, Robot, and the genuinely apocalyptic disaster conspiracy picture Knowing. Those are nothing if not big swings. But they can’t all connect big, hence his latest. Gods of Egypt is his worst, but only because it clearly got away from everyone involved, a mess of ideas and impulses at which a studio kept throwing money when a comprehensive rewrite would’ve been a better idea.

The film finds Egypt ruled by its Gods, towering gold-blooded giants who demand the praise and obedience of their small, humble mortal subjects. Lazy Horus (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is about to ascend to the throne when his Uncle Set (300’s Gerard Butler) takes the crown for himself. To add injury to insult, Set plucks out Horus’ diamond eyes and locks them in a vault. This casts the land into a villainous darkness that should be familiar to anyone who has seen this sort of thing before. The plot proper kicks off when a spirited human thief (Brenton Thwaites, playing the thin, pretty, bland hero) makes a deal with Horus. If he gets the God his eyes, then the God must find a way to save the poor boy’s grievously wounded One True Love (Courtney Eaton in gowns cut for maximum cleavage) from the clutches of the underworld. That’s all pro forma fantasy nonsense. The real glorious goofiness is in the details.

This is a movie in which a bald Geoffrey Rush pulls the sun across the flat Earth’s sky in a boat floating above the atmosphere, stopping periodically to do battle with a ginormous space worm. It features magic immortals who can turn into grotesque cartoony animals or extrude armored plates from their skin like Egyptian Transformers. It has Chadwick Boseman as an egotistical know-it-all God who clones himself a hundred times over, and Elodie Yung as a Goddess who can find anyone with magic sand, provided her magic bracelet keeps her literal demons at bay. There are waterfalls from outer space, Rubik cube pyramid puzzles, a crumbling sentient Sphinx, a flying chariot pulled by giant scarabs, and a days-long line of deceased souls ready to blissfully commune with a pulsing energy they call the afterlife. This is all pleasantly straight-faced odd, a mix between high fantasy and low cornball camp. Proyas takes the mythology just seriously enough, and stages some fun sequences, like two massive fire-breathing snakes attacking our heroes, or thundering fisticuffs atop a 2,000-cubit high obelisk.

But the screenplay by Dracula Untold’s Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless makes a miscalculation in becoming one of those fantasy stories that spends more time filling us in on its rules, caveats, backstory, prophecies, curses, and other assorted gobs of tedious exposition than in actually running through its main story. As a result the brightly lit movie feels endless and consequence free, since the magic is arbitrary and prone to change (with laborious explanation) if the next scene calls for it. There’s no weight. Add to this a feeling of a salvage job, with mismatched scenes, awkward jumps in logic, and plot holes papered over with afterthought narration and incessant tin-eared exposition, and the whole thing starts giving off a whiff of sloppiness. I mean, this is an Egyptology fantasy with a cast of Brits, Americans, Danes, Aussies, anyone but an actual Egyptian. (Butler’s brogue has to be the least fitting Cairo speaking voice since Edward G. Robinson’s in The Ten Commandments.) This is a clearly a movie that’s the product of an interesting directorial imagination hobbled by more than a few unfortunate decisions. 

Knowing (2009)

I had this post ready to go up yesterday but, as I was defending a movie that has recieved nearly universally negative reviews, I thought it best not to post on April Fool's Day.

The basic premise behind Knowing reads like a dumb numerology thriller. Nicolas Cage plays a scientist who comes into possession of a list of numbers – fresh from a time capsule – that line up accurately to the date of every global catastrophe of the past fifty years. In execution, as directed by Alex Proyas, Knowing is often chilling, sometimes even frightening; it generates great apocalyptic dread as the sky steadily grows redder as the film progresses. I’m not sure the plot makes total sense but the actors bring such commitment to the material which is just a little emotionally smarter than other similar features as it grapples in a surprisingly, ahem, knowing way with issues of spirituality.

Cage plays a widower having an existential crisis of purpose, which is especially troubling to his only child, a young boy (Chandler Canterbury) still grieving over the recent death of his mother. It’s also troubling to Cage’s father (Alan Hopgood), a reverend, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years, and his sister (Nadia Townsend) who, in an early scene, gently offers to pray for him. Then the list arrives, along with a newfound sense of purpose when he discovers that there are a handful of dates that are still in the future (although I was never exactly comprehending the way that purpose was suposed to help keep the events from happening). The way the knowledge of the list interacts with various characters is intriguing, as when Cage speaks with a colleague or a haunted woman played by Rose Byrne (with a face almost scarily thin) who enters the plot as well, but I’d hate to spoil it too much. The scene where Cage figures out the pattern, I must confess, gave me a jolt, even though I had been thoroughly informed by the advertising of the pattern's nature.

The movie then turns into a creep-fest with lurking strangers, haunting clues, and some very well-done special effect disaster sequences. The first, a plane crash, plays out in a single, smooth, unbroken take so convincing I barely felt like I was watching effects. The second disaster is much more obviously special effects but it’s so fast and intense that I didn’t care. In both cases, my eyes widened and I straightened in my seat as a result of their fantastical verisimilitude. I didn’t entirely understand why Cage, at one point learning the coordinates of a disaster, would rush towards it but sometimes, if a thriller’s working for you, things like that can be glossed over. And this one was working for me. It’s filled with great tension and creep-outs along with a nice twist on an it’s-only-a-cat moment. It sets up a grim premise (“What happens when the numbers run out?”) and then proceeds to push it farther and darker and stranger than I thought it would have the guts to go.

This is not a flawless film. The ending is a little strangely conceived (for those who’ve seen it, I’m not talking about the heat wave, I’m talking about the multiple vessels without multiple seen couples) and afterwards I could pick out additional possible plot holes. This is not a great science fiction film, like the director’s previous Dark City, but it’s in a similar spirit, taking on interesting questions (of faith and science this time) and exploring their emotional implications in a serious way.

Like Roger Ebert, I am at a loss as to the extremely negative reaction the film has received. It’s not always great art, not quite a cohesive whole (and I certainly didn’t like it as much as Mr. Ebert) but the movie is a fairly good example of a semi-smart B-movie popcorn thriller. It wants to raise philosophical questions while providing some excuses for good scares and for eyes to pop. In that, it succeeds.