Gods of Egypt

What could you buy with $140 mil­lion? Let’s not get straight into list-mak­ing, but the answer is a whole bunch of cool stuff. It could set you up nice­ly for a few life­times of gold­en jump-jets filled with caviar and bli­n­is. In the world of CG-dri­ven block­buster movies, though, this is chump change, found in the arm crevice of a bat­tered sofa with the aid of a man­gled coat hang­er. This was the report­ed price-tag of Alex Proyas’ maligned Gods of Egypt, and that was before addi­tion­al mar­ket­ing costs were fac­tored in. It would be a low blow to sug­gest that this was not mon­ey well spent, even if it’s true. Yet the prob­lem with the film isn’t that it’s awful, it’s more that the lev­els of ambi­tion far out­weigh its phys­i­cal resources.

It’s 2016, and if your bizarre, high-camp his­tor­i­cal­ly-inclined space opera (actu­al­ly, it’s more of a space cho­rus line) doesn’t look the bee’s knees, then you’re in major trou­ble. There’s a sequence in which a hench­man has his leg cut off by Niko­laj Coster-Waldau’s one-eyed earth­ly god, Horus, and it looks like an effect that was dredged up from the ear­ly ​’90s. It’s the type of visu­al that the mak­ers of The Lawn­mow­er Man might have seen and thought, ​‘Nah, that’s way too crud­dy for us.’ Sor­ry for all the cheap metaphors, but this is a Lotus chas­sis loaded up with a 50cc go-kart engine.

The fact that the film looks and feels unfor­giv­ably shod­dy isn’t real­ly an issue. Many great films from clas­sic-era Hol­ly­wood were made with minus­cule bud­gets with the aim of mak­ing back the pro­duc­tion costs as swift­ly as pos­si­ble. And more often than not, a great idea shines through the grimy out­er coat­ing. But the prob­lem is that audi­ences now have itchy trig­ger fin­gers when it comes to express­ing their aes­thet­ic dis­plea­sure. And there are easy access out­lets for them to do so. A stan­dard has been set for com­put­er gen­er­at­ed imagery, and any­thing that dips below that stan­dard will be open for abuse. It’s a shame, because you could argue that Proyas was intend­ing to make an eccen­tric B‑movie which punch­es far above its weight. In doing so, he left him­self wide open to easy crit­i­cism by those who are look­ing for rea­sons to gripe.

We are intro­duced to goody-goody goon Bek (Bren­ton Thwait­es) who is the human thief whose wily efforts help to top­ple the destruc­tive reign of Ger­ard Butler’s mega­lo­ma­ni­ac god, Set. Man­gling ancient Egypt­ian his­to­ry to the point where the only thing left is the names and the broad iconog­ra­phy, the film offers the usu­al sac­cha­rine cock­tail of tri­als, traps, corny expo­si­tion and ran­dom-ass space mon­sters, and to be hon­est, it’s a lot more fun than some­thing like the comparable/​execrable Wrath of the Titans.

There are some very obvi­ous ref­er­ences to David Lynch’s Dune and Richard Fleischer’s clas­sic swash­buck­ler, The Vikings, to give you some idea of its artis­tic remit. The gods are phys­i­cal­ly larg­er than humans, but this fact has no bear­ing on the plot what­so­ev­er. It must’ve been a pain for the con­ti­nu­ity. And they also bleed gold, which… well, what more is there to say on that mat­ter? Also of note is the fact that all female char­ac­ters must be attired in cloth­ing (the term seems inad­e­quate to describe the lace biki­nis they are actu­al­ly wear­ing) which allows the entire cleav­age to remain vis­i­ble from all angles, which seems high­ly imprac­ti­cal con­sid­er­ing the epic scale of their mis­sion. Maybe it’s these plung­ing neck­lines where the mak­ers cut back on the budget?