Gods of Egypt: an historic failure

Do you remember that “Clash of The Titans” reboot from 2010? Did you ever want it to be longer, stupider, and somehow make even less sense? Then “Gods of Egypt” is the movie for you!

From Alex Proyas, the “pristine” director of “I, Robot,” “The Crow,” and “Knowing,” comes his first feature in seven years. The plot revolves around the wind god, Horus, and his trusty sidekick, Aladdin, going on an epic journey to defeat the evil god, Set, and bore the audience.

Well, the above description isn’t entirely true. The sidekick’s name is actually Bek, but his character is so similar to Aladdin that this could be considered plagiarism.

To start off, this movie will in no way be pleasing to hardcore fanatics of Egyptian mythology. While the relationships between these deities are pretty sound and there are a few subtle references to other stories sprinkled around for people to find, their characterization and abilities are in many cases the polar opposites of what they should be. Set is demonized in order to make him a simple antagonist, Horus has absolutely no power over the wind, the god of wisdom, Thoth, is not wise, and all powerful god of the sun, Ra, is defeated easily.

In and of itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most audiences would be put off by an incredibly faithful adaptation of the myth and, as a fictional story, the creators are fully at liberty to experiment and come up with their own unique product. The true problem of this movie lies in its execution. From the very beginning, we are thrown into an alien world with hardly a paragraph of context as strange, 10-foot tall beings begin to prattle on about the afterlife and retirement parties, before a large group of people in silly red costumes show up and cause everyone to immediately surrender.

That is not an exaggeration. That is the opening scene of the movie, and the rest of the film tries desperately to follow in those shaky footsteps. In other words, neither Egyptian mythology buffs nor general audiences will find themselves enjoying the film.

The sad part is, there are a few things in here that make me want to admire the film. For one thing, the “gods” all bleed gold, so the movie is able to maintain a PG-13 rating despite a rather sizable level of violence and gore. For another, the general style of the film is very colorful and many of the set pieces are creative, just not used well.

Sadly, these good points are minimized by the abhorrent and often unnecessary use of cheap CGI in order to create all the action scenes. The satisfaction of seeing a bad guy get decapitated never feels as good when your brain can tell a computer made it.

Honestly, I would normally recommend this movie based on some of the silly parts alone, but since the film is over two hours long, the novelty of it will wear off before the end. Although, if you feel you take it, I didn’t even mention half of the strange things that happened in this film, such as Thoth’s brain getting ripped out of his head and placed into Set’s head (Thoth got better).

For everyone else, there is not much to get out of this and I would have to recommend you skip it.
Score: Bad/Sub-Moderate 1.5/5 on the Eye of Ra scale.