You have to believe there are plenty of ingredients within Egyptian mythology to inspire a fun, sprawling fantasy feature. The gods, the symbols, and the lore seem ready-made for the big budget, eye-popping blockbuster treatment. You would think that, right?
Gods of Egypt (2016), directed by Alex Proyas, could have been a good, honest, solid action movie referencing ancient Egypt in the manner of Stargate or the more playful adventure flick The Mummy. Instead, the movie was over the top and bombastic. Rather than embracing its glorious campiness, the movie played it straight. At times the CGI special effects seemed uneven, and the scripted lines were predictable.
This was one of those instances where I couldn’t help but think “It can’t be that bad.” The trailers looked ridiculous and critics ripped this thing to shreds. But I grew up loving the silly, cheesy but self-aware science-fiction and fantasy movies of the 1980s. When it comes to those films I have a lot of tolerance and forgiveness.
Movie Poster of Gods of Egypt
The Story and Characters
Where to start? I don’t know, how about with the story. Writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless already have a sketchy track record having penned the glaringly underwhelming “Dracula Untold” and “The Last Witch Hunter” (and working on the Power Rangers reboot for next year). The story basically crosses the paths of a young mortal named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) desperate to save his true love from the underworld and Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), Egyptian God of the air whose eyes were gouged out and his throne stolen by the jealous Set (Gerard Butler), the god of the desert.
Read also: Gods of Egypt: Hathor
Bek sees Horus as his only chance to save his fiancé. So there is a decent framework for a story…kinda. Unfortunately it hardly works on any level. Sazama and Sharpless gives us one uninteresting, paper-thin character after another and their stories are as bland as the characters themselves. And the performances don’t help. They range from passable (Coster-Waldau), to bad (Thwaites), to laughable (Butler), to downright weird (Geoffrey Rush in a role so absurd you have to see it to believe it). And it isn’t as if the dialogue helps them.
Gerard Butler as Set, the god of the desert.
Visuals and Special Effects
And then there are the special effects. At times it seems the script was written in service of the effects and not vice-versa. Director Alex Proyas is constantly trying to find ways for his CGI spectacle to take center stage. The visuals are all over the place. In terms of quality the effects are wildly inconsistent and sometimes shockingly gaudy for a film with a $140 million budget.
The special effects are just beyond horrific. This alternates between looking like a video game, Spy Kids movie at times, cheaply done, inconsistent, and ho hum at best. There are maybe a couple times at the start it looks good during the grand ceremony but besides that my god. It's amazing how shotty they look. It somehow is more oversaturated with CGI than the Star Wars prequels.
The cinematography is just constant green screen, medium upper body shots, sets so dark you can barely see or sets that are cheap with a green screen background. The whole thing reminds me of the glossy look of Crystal Skull but even worse. There is hardly anything tangible in this beyond the most basic level and it just is awful to look at.
Read also: Riddles of the Sphinx
Mythological Inaccuracies
Aside from the Egyptian gods turning into giant metal Transformer-esque beings, director Alex Proyas somehow managed to get some of the most basic attributes of the gods correct. While his attributions were competent, Proyas fell back on the typical tropes of Hollywood’s view of ancient Egypt: the exotic, animal-headed gods and the view that ancient Egypt was a mystical, unknown, magical culture. In reality, the gods were much more nuanced than was portrayed in this film, and ancient Egypt was a living, vibrant, human and very much Earthly culture.
The movie combines ancient Egyptian mythology, Marvel’s Thor franchise, the buddy action-adventure genre, the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and the ancient Greek myth of the riddling Sphinx. Why use one mythological world when you can use at least three and mash them all together?
In ancient Egyptian mythology, Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, is a god associated with kingship (specifically, the living king), aspects of the solar cult, the sky, the horizon, the east, the winds and the sunrise. During his eponymous battle with Set, Horus loses one eye, not the two as he does in the movie. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the Eye of Horus, or wadjet/udjet eye, is his left eye, which, in myth, represented the moon. The eye is eventually restored by Hathor, not a plucky thief. This eye is associated with healing as well as protection, strength and perfection.
In the film, Set rips out both of Horus’s eyes, but we’re not really told his reasons except that they are the source of Horus’s divine power, which allows him to turn into a golden, metal flying humanoid-bird figure.
Proyas portrays Set as an evil god; however, in Egyptian mythology, Set is a little bit more complicated. He is the god associated with chaos, storms and bad weather, the desert and foreigners. He is the brother of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, who is also Set’s wife, and the uncle to Horus. As a result of his reign as king, he also had a connection to Egyptian kingship. Set is an instigator of change. Additionally, as a god associated with foreigners, he is often associated with the Near Eastern goddesses Astarte and Anat (who are not a set of monster-cobra-riding assassins in mythology as they are portrayed in the film).
Read also: Is Gods of Egypt Suitable?
Proyas rightly connects Set to the desert, and his use of Astarte and Anat was a subtle (and surprisingly correct) nod to their connection. It was moments like these that were aggravating. Someone appears to have done their homework, yet it wasn’t always consistent throughout the movie, as we have Set turning himself into some sort of Voltron-like being with his stolen items from fellow gods.
Thoth is most famous for his association with knowledge and writing, but perhaps less known for his connection to the moon. He is often depicted as an ibis-headed god, but sometimes he may be depicted as a baboon. Thoth tends to carry around a stylus and papyrus to record events. Movie-Thoth was a relief with his sassy, dead-panned lines and academic outlook on life, but why was he so stiff? He seemed so uncomfortable with his lines that he made me squirm in my seat. Is that how Proyas views intelligent, academic-like individuals? As socially awkward, pedantic, pompous people who walk around inexplicably (and uncomfortably) holding their elbows behind their backs?
The ship of Ra is an example of a moment where Proyas captured something deeper in ancient Egyptian mythology. It demonstrated what could have been for this movie. Proyas’s story of Ra wasn’t perfect, but I was rather impressed by Geoffrey Rush’s scenes. And, to be honest, they were probably the most enjoyable of the non-action scenes.
The Egyptian myths explain the sun’s movement in many ways. Sometimes the sun is the scarab beetle god Khepre, pushing the solar disk across the sky like a giant dung ball; other times, it is Ra sailing across the sky in his solar barque. At night, Ra has to sail through the netherworld and fight off demons, monsters and the serpent Apophis, who symbolizes evil and chaos. Movie-Ra sails across the sky in a rather fabulous alien spacecraft that tows the sun, which trails behind it on a flimsy rope (Egyptology aside, wouldn’t that cause some serious drag on the solar ship?). In his universe, Ra (and his trailing sun) sailed over the edge of the world and under it, and while it was rather clumsily done visually, I appreciated the attempt. In the movie, Ra has to battle the demon alone.
Ra's ship battling Apophis in the movie Gods of Egypt.
The movie sets were overblown and bombastic and looked like the love child of Asgard and the Las Vegas Luxor Hotel and Casino. While lovely to look at, it was not in any way accurate. In some aspects, Proyas’s vision worked only because it echoed the Egyptian revival style paintings by 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century painters and opera set designers. Rather like those Egyptian revival artists, Proyas simply translated ancient Egyptian architecture into modern forms. By doing so, he successfully perpetuates the Hollywood anachronistic view of ancient Egyptian architecture and motifs. He rather lazily used the same kingly titles and names over and over again as pure decoration without seeming to understand their meaning, such as Tutankhamun’s throne name, Nebkheperure, on Ra’s spaceship. Ironically, Osiris’s name is literally written all over Set’s obelisk.
I’m continually baffled by Hollywood’s insistence on deliberately creating inaccurate stories from ancient history. The film, for all of its laziness in its representation of ancient Egyptian mythology, religious beliefs and society (after all, Proyas admitted that he wasn’t concerned with accuracy in this film), managed to capture a few subtleties of Egyptian mythology. I don’t know if the fleeting moments of random accuracy were by accident or by design. Proyas demonstrated what could have been for his movie, and very small glimpses of potential brilliance shone through.
So liiiike Gods Of Egypt Has Been Whitewashed
Casting and Whitewashing Controversy
Notoriously stocked with nary a one Egyptian actor (Omar Sharif is dead - better call… Geoffrey Rush??) Gods of Egypt has come under fire for “whitewashing” its cast. While all the leads are indeed caucasian, and I'm in no way inclined to apologize for this movie, perhaps a more accurate observation is that this Egypt is strangely ethnically diverse.
The lack of a diverse cast and Proyas’s casting choices remain a mystery. Proyas sort-of-apologized last year for the casting, saying he would’ve hired more actors of color if it hadn’t made the movie so hard to finance at the budget level he needed. As is, the most prominent nonwhite actor is Chadwick Boseman as a faintly bitchy incarnation of Thoth, the father of science, religion, philosophy and magic.
| God/Character | Actor |
|---|---|
| Horus | Nikolaj Coster-Waldau |
| Set | Gerard Butler |
| Ra | Geoffrey Rush |
| Thoth | Chadwick Boseman |
| Bek | Brenton Thwaites |
Main Cast of Gods of Egypt
Final Thoughts
More could be said but frankly what’s the point? It’s such a poorly written mess. The direction lets the film down in scene after scene. Gerard Butler’s Nic Cage-like career decline continues. And Egyptian mythology was never so boring. I suppose you could have a “It’s so bad it’s good” type of experience, but to do so would requires a lot of face palms, head scratching, eye-rolling, and time checking. If you’re up to trying it by all means give it a shot.
Although I walked into the movie expecting very little accuracy, I didn’t anticipate the lack of fulfillment that I felt by its missed opportunities via casting choices, scripted lines and the special effects.
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