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A Geek's Reaction to the Exodus: Gods and Kings Trailer

July 9, 2014

By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)

Religious movies are big bucks at the box office, make no mistake about it. Noah, while debated in the religious community about its merits as a religious tale, still managed to bring in just under $360 million worldwide in theaters. Exodus: Gods and Kings will be no different, I suspect, because you have one of the biggest Biblical stories of them all and Ridley Scott who is, frankly, one of the best visual directors of our time, directing it.

Christian Bale plays Moses, the man with the direct line to God, who wants to free his enslaved people from the Egyptians. Of course the Pharaoh, Ramses, doesn’t want to let go of his labor force, and God sends different forms of destruction upon Egypt until he lets them go. The trailer for this epic film has just hit the net, check it out here:

I don’t know about you but my reaction to that is… huh.

It’s not a bad teaser, and it is visually stunning, I’m just not sure what this film will bring to the Exodus story that we haven’t seen before. Having said that, there’s one hopeful sign I saw in the trailer that makes me think this film can avoid the problem?Prometheus had of being visually stunning, but saddled with what I thought was an inept screenplay.

The relationship between Moses and Ramses would be the deciding factor on how good this film might be. I don’t know if it’s my own preconceived notions of the biblical story with Ramses being the bad guy, but in this trailer he comes off as very two dimensional. I know it’s unfair of me to make that claim based on only 90 seconds of footage, but that seems to be my take on it.

Bale is in fine form, as always, but after watching that trailer, I’m fascinated by what could be done with Ramses. Think about it: Moses, in all but blood disappears into the desert, and when he comes back he’s changed, and asking Ramses to free all the Israelites who the Egyptians need as a work force. What is the political fallout of freeing the slaves? Here’s a character you can make a great tragic study of and I’d love to see someone tackle that one day.

And what about Moses? Ramses is the man he grew up with, and his God pits both of them against each other. How do you reconcile that? There’s quite a bit of drama that could be explored between these two characters, and I hope that’s the direction they’re going in but I see very little of that dilemma in this trailer. Some posters have also been released for the film which I also find fairly bland which you can see in the gallery below. I really hope the next trailer will kick up the drama a notch, I’m just not that impressed by this project so far.