Exodus Review

The mediocrity of today's Hollywood, the artistic and conceptual misery that asks to risk the least and has plunged North American cinema into the worst crisis in its history, has led production companies to settle in a continuous state of production and premiere of remakes , one after another like the waves on the beach, each worse and more unnecessary.

It was to be expected that the filmmakers with pretensions, those who transcend -even if only a little- the condition of mere serial operators, would bang their fists on the table and dare to break those quicksands in which cinema sinks one year in and another also for too long. But Ridley Scott will not be one of them; not only because his career was progressively declining -and picking up speed- after Blade runner , but because in 2000 he made the most blatant e-plagiarism remak in the history of the seventh art and it went so well that he took flight when it had been crawling around the bottom of his septic tank for quite some time now. So he must have thought that if GladiatorIt had been a bargain, why not repeat the play? And he set his sights on another classic to muck up, The Ten Commandments .

The story of Moisés has known successive versions on the screen since Cecil B DeMille shot the first silent one in 1923, although it was the one he directed in 1956 that has truly remained in the memory of viewers: the one starring Charlton Heston as the biblical prophet alongside Yul Brinner in the role of Ramses II and Anne Baxter in the role of Nefertari, plus other luxury secondary characters such as Edward G. Robinson, John Derek, Yvonne de Carlo and Debra Paget. Later, RAI would make a television series in 1977 with Burt Lancaster (of which a special montage was made for its premiere in commercial theaters) and in 1998 Dreamworks presented The Prince of Egypt, a cartoon film that came to be a musical version of The Ten Commandments .

So we had been sixteen years without wandering Jews, evil exploitative Egyptians, picturesque plagues, miraculously opening waters, and burning bushes. Too much, apparently, and Scott made us all shake by announcing the launch of Exodus. Gods and Kings . The title makes an obvious reference to the book of the Bible that tells that passage, of which we must always bear in mind that there are no more historiographical references, which makes many researchers suspect that it lacks historicity and that it was more of a legend. created to explain the origin of the Hebrew people, as so many other peoples with an uncertain past have done.

After all, there are too many dark points (very black, rather), in all of this: Moses, for example, appears mentioned in the Bible almost exclusively, without the slightest proof of his existence (no matter how much tradition attributed to him the authorship of the text of Exodus and the Pentateuch in general) and with a story behind it suspiciously similar to that of Sargon of Akkad.

The truth is that the whole adventure of Moses is an enigma on which there is no way for archaeologists to agree. Even the defenders of its existence point rather to the fact that it was Egyptian , since the presence of Hebrews in the country of the Nile is debatable and let alone the specific date in which it should be placed: in the Hyksos period according to some; in the reign of Akhenaten say others; in that of Ramses II he illustrates cinema...

Some theory even speaks of more than one exodus, during the reigns of different pharaohs. Impossible to know anything for sure in the absolute absence of reviews from the Egyptians themselves. And as it turns out that no archaeological record has been found either, it is not possible to determine exactly the itinerary followed by Moiśes at the head of his men. That said: very suspicious .

Scott's film follows the somewhat jarring fashion of trying to give a rational explanation for things. The plagues have their scientific, environmental cause, just like the opening and subsequent closing of the waters of the Red Sea (with its sharks and everything) is due to a tidal wave caused by a meteorite. Likewise, Moiśes' treatment with Yahweh seems to obey a false move in his mind, although this scientism seems to be obviated when the divine curse falls on Egypt and kills the first-born Egyptians exclusively without further explanation .

Of course, for some time now the scripts with which this director works do not stand out precisely for their rigor or their coherence and there is the chaos of Prometheus , one of the lowest levels of his filmography if not the most, for prove it. And that the libretto of Exodus is signed by no less than four authors: Adam Cooper , Bill Collage , Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian (the latter Oscar winner for Schindler's List ).