Failure Begets Failure in Exodus: Gods and Kings

Exodus: Gods and Kings. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Following the stinging critical reaction to The Counselor, in 2014 Ridley Scott sought solace in that thing which he loves so much and has given him such joy and success in his career: a good old fashioned, big budget sword and sandal historical epic. Unfortunately, Exodus: Gods and Kings was absolutely terrible, a box office bomb and everyone hated it.

For one, it got pilloried for casting Christian Bale as Moses and other whitewashing casting choices. Then Bale said some less than diplomatic things about Moses (who, if you follow these sorts of things, is rather popular among a certain section of the population). The film was so bad, in fact, that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates banned it - officially for “historical inaccuracies” but in actuality because it sucked.

This was a big, swing for the fences 10 Commandments style historical epic. And it did not deliver. At 150 minutes it is long and meant to be epic, but you need to earn the right to make your movie an extra 30 minutes longer, and Exodus just doesn’t. I struggled to finish this film, and spent long portions of it browsing the internet.

There’s a saying about going back to the same well one too many times. I don’t know what it means because I’ve always drank municipal water, but it seems appropriate for this film. Ridley Scott smashed a home run with Gladiator, a sweeping historical epic set in Rome. He stumbled a bit with his sweeping historical epic set in Jerusalem, though it was saved by an extended version. And he flat out fell with this sweeping historical epic set in Egypt and there is apparently no saving this one as no extended cut has ever been forthcoming. Maybe there are only so many historical epics that one person has in them during the course of their career and Ridley Scott has reached that limit.

With two pretty big bombs in a row - both a big budget historical epic and a smaller, supposedly more actor and narrative-driven thriller - along with the confusing panoply that was Prometheus and some personal issues in his life around that time, there were some in the mid-2010s who no doubt wondered if Ridley Scott was starting to burn out. But reports of Ridley Scott’s career swan song were quite premature. The man is a master filmmaker and he wasn’t going to let something as trivial as box office bombs and terrible movies slow him down.

After Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott bounced back in a big way with The Martian in which Matt Damon uses a glove filled with air to fart himself through space. For this work of visionary genius, Scott and his team were universally lauded and received numerous Academy Award nominations. After The Martian restored humanity’s faith in Ridley Scott, he followed it up with Alien: Covenant which is a strange, beautiful, baffling addition to the franchise that fits right in as a companion piece to Prometheus.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a pretty terrible movie. It is filled with problematic choices, cinematic and otherwise. It had big ambitions, and was looking to traffic in what had been a reliable genre trope for Ridley Scott. It failed. But that’s OK. I believe these kind of ambitious failures are very important, and Ridley Scott has the clout to get them made and not have his career extinguished when they fail. Indeed, he bounced right back the following year with a smash commercial and critical success. Thank God for this big budget failures, and the visionaries who can get them made.