At the advance screening for Alex Proyas’ megabudgeted misfire Gods of Egypt, someone in the row in front of me turned on his phone in plain sight of those behind him and started texting. Under normal circumstances, I’d be more than happy to yell at a complete stranger over this sort of thing, but when I looked at the screen, I saw that only an hour had passed in the movie. That meant there was another hour to go. I was too depressed to confront the man. And if it didn’t violate one of my central moviegoing principles, I might have joined him.
This movie is bad. Legendarily bad. So bad you have to wonder how they managed to spend $140 million on a product that looks awful, makes absolutely no sense and wavers between being wildly overwritten and feeling completely improvised. The problem isn’t just that it’s visually disorienting. It’s not just that it’s 127 minutes of exposition that zips by without being entirely sure of its own mythology. Gods of Egypt is a focus group gone wrong, as though every idea in its conception was included, no matter how dumb, dull or defiant of its own internal logic.
The story—such as it is—follows Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as he seeks revenge against his uncle Set (Gerard Butler, who doesn’t even attempt to hide his Scottish accent) after a coup during what was supposed to be Horus’ coronation. Set seals the deal by removing Horus’ magical eye from his head and banishing him to a remote temple to live in misery. Along comes a puckish (intolerably so) mortal named Bek (Brenton Thwaites), a gifted thief who manages to steal Horus’ heavily protected eye. He brings the eye to Horus, and in so doing strikes a bargain that would bring Bek’s love from the grave if he aids Horus in his quest for revenge.
The rest of the film sees Set consolidating his power and quelling rebellions, while the duo seeks the source of Set’s power in order to weaken him. That could have been a good premise for a halfway decent escapist fantasy, but Proyas fills the proceedings with constant exposition, introducing new rules for gods and gigantic set pieces that would be difficult to follow even if they weren’t visually garbled.
Gods have liquid gold instead of blood. They’re also huge, more than twice the size of mortal men. They can transform into winged metallic beasts when they want to, except when they’re wounded, but sometimes they do anyway. There’s also a big outer space sandworm that really wants to eat the flat earth, and it is the burden of Ra (a lost-looking Geoffrey Rush) to battle this creature night after night. This happens in the film as suddenly as that description did in this paragraph. The last 20 minutes is then devoted to untangling this preposterous knot with some kind of conclusion, one that somehow manages to dredge up every subplot without resolving a damn thing.
You might remember the controversy over the almost entirely white cast depicting Egyptian characters (Chadwick Boseman being the only person of color in the main cast) that erupted shortly after the trailer debuted last year, resulting in a rare advance apology from Lionsgate. While a more diverse cast in such a high-profile film would have been a welcome change, a clearer picture begins to emerge after actually seeing the film. If the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to put careful consideration into making a coherent story or action sequence, it stands to reason they’d be equally clueless when it comes to the ethnicity of the actors. I feel for the talented performers of color who would have been excellent in the roles. But I also pity the actors who accepted this job in good faith only to be sent adrift on an utterly doomed vessel like Gods of Egypt.
Gods of Egypt
PG-13, 127 minutes
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
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