A film as mediocre as its mythological and historical accuracy
Geoffrey Rush fights a planet-eating monster with a fire-spitting spear on a spaceship, in order to protect a flat Earth while his kids/grand-kids slaughter each other.
The above statement basically summarises the amount of ridiculousness Gods of Egypt can offer, while it does in some bizarre way sound quite original and indeed, a fun way to connect Egyptian mythology to the modern world, the execution makes the notion a hardship in need of bearing rather than enjoying. This principle also extends to the rest of the film, which in concept has some adequate amount of originality, but frankly with the kind of writing it possesses it’s doomed to be a failure.
Dubbed with almost everything that’s wrong with the current Hollywood scene, including a white-washed cast and a CGI heavy trailer, Gods of Egypt never quite dug itself out from the abyss of prejudice. Judging by its US box office premier, the numbers seem to be telling a similar story at a 15 million weekend – which may be decent for the likes of the Witch, but when you’ve dished in $140 million and expects the spawning of a trilogy, 15 million is a flop-of-the-year earning.
Opening with some heavily seasoned, exotic music and a bass voice over, the film seems to be doing alright…. the dialogues are quickly and hurriedly composed with little time for developments, instead we have some rather unnecessary exposition, the saturation of musical score renders the screen a bit distracting to focus on but overall still a watchable beginning.
Until an over-baked Gerard Butler shows up, interrupting a coronation ceremony where Lord of the Air – Horus shall soon become the new ruler god of Egypt, as determined by his father, and Butler’s on screen brother – Osiris.
Switching to our other set of inappropriately coloured couple, thief Bek and his girlfriend Zaya display some of the cheesiest acting/lines that could have possibly been written for that particular occasion, the inadequacy of both the acting and the plain composition of the introduction is just… unwatchable.
When you have CG effects that seem like chrome plated toys for children, you better have some kind of build-up to support it without making it seem completely over-produced. Gods of Egypt does NOT do this well. Already, the cliché of godly transformations is in use, and the film presents nothing to counter the cheapness of the concept, disrupting the fluency of the story and the flow of the screen by delivering such an eye-sore.
The twists almost always appear to be pointless and in some respects idiotic when coupled with arguably well-structured action sequences, which on one hand adds to the amount of screen time that is purely enjoyable as it disregards the terrible context it resides in, however the writing that puts way too much effort into its attempt to be epic is both inescapable and in retrospect – haunting to sit through.
Usually when a film becomes confusing, it’s during the second act, Gods of Egypt is different. In the fact that the plot holes/scenes that do not contain a lick of logic try to murder our senses before the middle of a two hour feature even arrives. The direct correlation between the narrative progress and the narrative stupidity is frankly, a pain to watch. Hint to future directors intending to involve mythology in their story-telling, making the gods avatar-sized does not make them any more special than civilians in an over-arching plot so loosely strung-up it’s as if the scribe gave up and decided there’s more to life than piecing together the adventures of severely jacked-up men and women. The predictable development of the film makes little effort to explain the impossible, and takes even less attempt to fix the improbable storyline.
An overall atrocity served with a side of insanity, Gods of Egypt has the concept of Percy Jackson, the mediocrity of Jupiter Ascending and the writing of any below-average superhero movie. It’s not all irredeemably horrible, there are some ‘oh-snap’/chuckle moments hidden in the tens of unfunny jokes, and those one or two CGI scenes do truly impress, yet honestly when you consider the gigantic budget, it’s never remotely acceptable to put in this many disagreeable clips to get one right.
In theatres Australia wide from 25th of February
MPAA Rating: M
ACB Rating: M
Run Time: 127 min
An overzealous film critic wannabe, Henry Pan makes a trip down cinema lane once a week, in order to decrease his ever-increasing massive watch list. You can follow him and hear all about his rants on films, life and pet dogs on Twitter @LifeOfPan.
