Exodus – Gods And Kings: Blu-ray Review
The Movie:
This is the story of the defiant leader Moses (Christian Bale) as he rises up against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton), setting 600,000 slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt and its terrifying cycle of deadly plagues.
There have been plenty of films that have tackled this story before but never one quite like this. Ridley Scott is known for his really big budget movies and they definitely gave this biblical story the big budget treatment. Scott’s visual style has always been nothing short of beautiful. Every background almost takes on a character of it’s own and the production design was pretty amazing when it came down to the structures used. The cast was a bit “out there”. Bale of course was fantastic and extremely convincing in every scene he was in but some of the supporting cast I thought was a bit of an odd choice. There was Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro and Aaron Paul. Weaver felt like she just didn’t fit into the scenario and I just kept seeing Turturro as his Transformers character. The surprising one was Paul. I kept expecting his Breaking Bad tone to leak into his performance but that wasn’t the case. He did a great job at giving the right feel for the era and even though he didn’t have a huge part, his performance was one of the things that kept me watching. I have to be honest, I was a little torn with this film because as beautiful as it is I still hold The Ten Commandments pretty high on a pedestal. This movie wasn’t bad but it wasn’t the best either. I will say that it’s much better than Noah though as far as biblical movies go so that’s a plus. It’s definitely an interesting flick to check out but with all of the CG it’s hard to fully connect with the film completely. 7/10
Special Features:
The Exodus Historical Guide – A factual track that goes along with the film and gives details of what’s going on.
Deleted and Extended Scene – 15 minutes worth of scenes here that aren’t bad at all.
Commentary by Ridley Scott and Jeffrey Caine
