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Showing posts with label bible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bible. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Thursday, December 4, 2014
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Exodus: Gods and Kings is very nearly a secular Bible adventure. Yahweh's influence is steadily pared back to a series of logically consistent natural disasters and vivid hallucinations after by Moses gets bonked on the head by a big rock. This is the core argument at the centre of Exodus: Moses fanatical religious revolution clashing with the pragmatic realpolitik of Rhamses. Ridley Scott appears to be asking "Is Moses crazy? And if he is does it matter?"
Set in 1300BCE we meet Moses (Christian Bale) as the adopted son and general in Pharoah Seti's (John Turturro) army. He's favoured by the court and gently rankles heir apparent Rhamses (Joel Edgerton). Still, the two are brothers-in-arms and it becomes quickly apparent that they'd die for one another. But once the Seti dies and Rhamses takes the throne political constraints begin to wind their way around the new Pharoah's heart.
With the revelation of Moses' birth to a slave mother he's summarily exiled from Memphis, wandering across the blasted landscape until he eventually comes across the model-sexy nomadic goat-tender Zipporah (Maria Valverde). Nine years later Moses is settled with a wife and kids, happily tending to his flock and whiling away the hours happily throwing rocks into a bucket.
But then he's whanged on the head by a big rock and has a hallucinatory freakout, concluding that God has told him to liberate the Jewish slaves of Egypt. He returns to Memphis as a crazed religious revolutionary, drawing followers to him with his magnetic presence while disturbing them with his fanaticism. After making his demands soon comes a river of blood, frogs, flies, locusts and so on.
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| John Turturro makes a neat Pharoah. But there's not much of him. |
The obvious antecedent to Exodus is Darren Aronofsky's excellent Noah. These two biblical films share a rough aesthetic, dragging divine stories through the dust and giving their (literally) iconic heroes a big dollop of psychological turmoil. The difference is that while a large portion of Noah's success is derived from willingness to portray what's in scripture - no matter how weird - Exodus often feels a bit embarrassed about the whole God thing.
It's not quite spiritually insincere; Christian Bale's performance as Moses has a hyper-focussed intensity that reminds you why he's such a great actor. Key to his Moses is that Bale takes everything utterly seriously; doubling down on the madness of Moses and playing him as a genuinely weird, mad-eyed, scraggly bearded zealot. He's odd to the point where other characters treat him with kid gloves, hiding behind rocks and worriedly watching him argue with his imaginary friends.
Next to Bale's Moses everyone else feels a bit dulled. Edgerton's Rhamses eventually builds up to a maniacal emotional peak, but for most of the film he's stuck in a mild miff. Everyone else feels a bit wasted, with great actors playing underdeveloped characters that don't have proper dramatic arcs. A prime offender is Aaron Paul's Joshua, who's relegated to staring on in disbelief, any depth to him apparently left on the cutting room floor. Sigourney Weaver as Rhamses' mother Tuya fares even worse, getting just one or two clipped lines before unceremoniously vanishing.
This reeks of a future director's cut that fleshes out these trimmed subplots. It wouldn't be the first time Ridley Scott's directorial hand has been forced; critical consensus on Kingdom of Heaven was notably revised once the diluted theatrical version was supplanted by a longer cut on DVD. I suspect the same will happen to Exodus, even at two and a half hours it feels a bit cramped.
Where it does succeed is creating a sense of massiveness Scott is shooting for an old school, DW Griffiths/DeMille style and largely succeeds. The plague sequences are imaginatively and pretty grossly shot, with nauseating shots of swarming flies and writhing, wet frogs. The film reaches a visual peak in the parting of the sea sequence, which (as you'd expect) works as a neat depiction of mankind's powerlessness in the face of humongous elemental forces.
Despite Scott's easy talent for spectacle and the impressive production values (the eyeliner budget alone must be enormous) Exodus never quite emotionally connects with the audience, settling at showing us the story of Moses without asking us to become spiritually or emotionally involved with it. To be fair, some of this is a symptom of narrative problems with The Bible. Having a protagonist that begins as a proactive revolutionary end up as a reactive observer drains his autonomy. Ideally Moses would have been the instigator of the plagues, personally bearing the burden of deciding what's to happen to the Egyptians himself. But I suppose doing this is probably not worth having a load of Bible nerds getting all shirty that you'd taken liberties with the source material.
Exodus isn't a disaster but neither is it that great. This a competent, sometimes visually interesting film that plays the story of Moses about as safe as you reasonably can in 2014. Neither willing to go full Noah crazy with the miracles, nor bold enough to present a secular vision of Moses' story, it feels like it's trying to please believers and non-believers alike. And so, in the end it truly pleases no-one.
★★
Exodus: Gods and Kings is released 26th December in the UK, 12th December in the US.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
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Noah is completely bonkers in the best possible way. The Biblical epic has fallen out of fashion in mainstream cinema and, buoyed by a love of The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, Aronofsky is determined to bring it back with style. He does with an incredibly earnest, largely humourless, crazily imaginative and idiosyncratic ecological fable by way of some of the most symbolic and densely written portions of The Bible.
Everyone knows the basics of Noah. God, like someone wrestling with a malfunctioning iPhone, has thrown his hands up frustration at the immoral shit infesting his creation and decided to 'Reset to Factory Settings'. He's basically sticking a paperclip in the back of the Earth and trying a hard reset - starting again from scratch. Well nearly from scratch anyway. He instructs Noah to build a big boat and load up two of every animal on it, the idea being that they'll survive the flood while everyone else dies horribly and when the waters recede he can have another stab at creation. I guess everyone, even God, gets at least one do-over.
What you might not remember from Sunday School are the gigantic murderous rock monsters, the post-apocalyptic industrial civilisations, the guns, steel and welding masks, the generous lashings of incest and Noah going totally nutso and setting his murderous sights on newborn babies. But hey, The Bible is a crazy book full of chatty snakes, donkeys and bushes so the odd rock giant and baby-stabbing really shouldn't be so surprising. Aronofsky clearly finds a perverse freedom to make a crazy film by sticking as close to the text as possible - it's hard to think of a better defence than to refer directly to the text themselves when making a Bible film.
The end product is a defiantly individualistic film with few obvious antecedents. There's elements of Lord of the Rings in the grubbily plausible fantasy world, the wrecked industrial landscape recalls the Fallout series of games, the gangs of grubby raiders are lifted from Mad Max, and the way the giants move and fight are peculiarly reminiscent of Michael Bay's Transformers. Being tossed into this world is a dislocating experience that Aronofsky exploits to the fullest, placing himself in the position of introducing us to an exciting 'new' fictional landscape within one of the most familiar stories of our civilisation.
The weight of myth lies heavy in Noah, blanketing every single decision and action in the film with incredible significance. This intangible element is largely why the film works, arising from a combination of committed performances, excellent production design and weighty cinematography. To various degrees of success the cast throw themselves headlong into the material, and though the younger members of the cast like Emma Watson and Logan Lerman occasionally come a bit unstuck they at least put in the right amount of effort. But Noah is ultimately a film about grizzled old badasses, the performances from Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Russell Crowe redefining roaring, confident machismo.
Winstone, playing Tubal-Cain, King of men and direct descendant of Cain, hurls himself into the role with barnstorming gusto. Who wouldn't when you get to stand in front of an army and give a rousing speech vowing vengeance against God? Later on, when he's charging at fallen angels, spear in hand and roaring a throaty cry of rage it's difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for the guy, even though he's obviously the villain. Hopkins as the 969 year old Methuseleh is a little more restrained, interpreting the role as a playful Yoda type, shot through with the steel of countless past battles.
But it's Crowe that utterly dominates Noah. He's so burly, so bearded and so macho that him being able to build a boat to contain all the world's animals begins to seem oddly plausible. Impressively Crowe takes Noah from idealised, kindly all-father right through to homicidal maniac without ever losing the character's thread. He excels in subtly externalising the internal agony of the character, typified by a great shot of him sitting alone in his ark listening to the terrified screams of the hundreds outside being dashed to death on rocks by a vengeful God. Later, when he reaches the coldly logical decision that all humans must die, he portrays a man out to stab some babies to death and still basically keeps the audience's sympathy. There's not a huge amount of actors that can pull that off, even fewer with his astonishing level of physical commitment.
What does all this inspiration, artistry and effort add up to then? In Aronofsky's hands, Noah becomes an ecological parable: a debate between misanthropy and philanthropy. The Antediluvian industrial world of Noah is polluted and violent, threatened by rising sea levels that are the direct result of man's nature. Sound familiar? The meat of the movie is a battle between the idea that humanity is irrevocably destructive; even with the best intentions we destroy our environment and the world would be better off without us in it, and the opposing idea that humans are intrinsically worthwhile as a way for the universe to understand itself and add context to the chaos of nature.
At stake is the beauty of the natural world, the 'innocent' animals the true victims of our unquenchable hunger. Given the broad strokes of the fable it's not exactly surprising that Noah comes out in favour of animal rights, deliberating placing the worth of animals above even human life. Refreshingly it even comes right out and says that eating meat is morally wrong - a position that I happen to agree with - though one I've never ever seen a mainstream movie espouse so plainly.
The film shares this spiritual/humanist intelligence with Aronofsky's earlier The Fountain. I met Aronofsky after I saw Noah and asked him about this connection. He informed me that the two films comprise a loose duo - both dealing with the consequences of Eden - one with the Tree of Knowledge and one with the Tree of Life. In addition the seed pod that's so significant in The Fountain reappears in Noah as the trigger to begin construction of the Ark. After their respective apocalypses both films conclude with the seeds of a brighter future being sown in the soil. It'd be all too easy for both films to conclude that life is pointless and that humanity is a cancer on this planet, yet even after all the misery and pain Aronofsky proves an optimist, his films finding worth and purpose in the teeming, smelly, vicious mess of mankind.
Noah is far from perfect. Often it's frankly a bit of a mess, but a beautiful, intelligent mess packed with astounding visual imagery (that Creation sequence - woah!) and yet another awe-inspiring score by Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet. It's nice to know that there's people willing to splash out tens of millions of dollars to realise Aronofsky's idiosyncratic vision. The result is a fascinating piece of cinema that defiantly stands apart from the crowd and resists easy classification.
★★★★
Noah is on general release from April 4th
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