Raise your hand if you want to see Moses portrayed as an insurgent lunatic terrorist with a bad conscience, the pharaoh who sought the murder of all first-born Hebrew slaves as a nice and reasonable fellow, and God as a foul-tempered 11-year-old boy with an English accent.
All right, I see a few hands raised, though maybe they belong to people who are still demonstrating about Ferguson. So let me ask you this: How many of you want to see how Hollywood has taken the story of the Hebrew departure from ancient Egypt — by far the most dramatic tale in the world’s most enduring book — and turned it into a joyless, dull, turgid bore?
I don’t know when I’ve seen a movie as self-destructively misconceived as Exodus: Gods and Kings, the director Ridley Scott’s $200-million retelling of the Moses story that has as much chance of making $200 million at the American box office as Ted Cruz has of winning the District of Columbia in the November 2016 election.
No one has explained to me why it was necessary to redo The Ten Commandments. I guess maybe it brings it to a new audience, with better effects, but why so totally screw with the Biblical story line?
This doesn’t inspire confidence for Scott’s upcoming treatment of The Martian.
[Update a few minutes later]
Also, this:
The problem with genre deconstruction in a biblical film is that Blue State audiences won’t touch religious-oriented films with a barge pole, and Red State audiences know when they’re being gaslighted, and those who see the film during its opening weekend quickly tell their friends to avoid yet another boilerplate Hollywood attack on religion. While some initial leftwing critics screamed that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was arguably torture porn and/or anti-Semitic, Red State audiences quickly discovered through word of mouth that Mel was perhaps the last filmmaker in Hollywood who took the notion of God and Jesus seriously. (As Hans Fiene of the Federalist quipped last week, if Hollywood wants to get its biblical blockbuster groove back, just “Pretend Mel Gibson is Roman Polanski.”
Heh.
[Update a while later]
It occurs to me that people opposed to this kind of thing don’t have to threaten to bomb theaters. It’s self detonating.
I wonder if it ever occurred to the Hollywood types that the same formula for getting comic book movies to succeed might or might not work the same for other works such as the bible.
Comic books and graphic novels were part of a sub-culture, but Hollywood made money off of them by making the story-telling more accessible to the general audience, while remaining “just true enough” to the source material that they didn’t offend the original target. For example, Star Trek (2009) and Iron Man were both more successful than originally anticipated because they expanded their audience without being completely off-putting to their core demographic. The X-Men sequels (before the recent re-re-boot)? Not quite as much.
Yes, part of the success of some of the recent superhero movies came from showing their minor flaws as much as their heroic abilities, but to completely reverse the roles in a basically-good-vs-evil story line in a book based completely on morality story-telling is ludicrous, at best.
Mel Gibson is still excommunicated from society for making a movie that appealed to Christians. Oh, someone might claim it is because of what he said when drunk but people in that industry say crazy stuff like that alllllll the time. No one else is held to that standard.
Seems clear to me that Ridley Scott is determined to prove that Prometheus was not a fluke.
Here’s my Hollywood pitch.
There is this Jewish High Priest who kills a guy with his bare hands for desecrating the Temple, then he and his sons head for the hills of Judea. They wage an insurgent warfare campaign, kicking Seleucid butt. There is this wicked babe who not only gives but takes . . . OK Rand, your site is family friendly, I will leave this part out of the movie trailer. It’s the back story of Hannukah and the movie is called . . .
The Hammer!
“No one has explained to me why it was necessary to redo The Ten Commandments. I guess maybe it brings it to a new audience, with better effects, but why so totally screw with the Biblical story line?”
Because if you watch the 10 Commandments you’ll observe it’s a veeeeery slow moving movie with not enough action for today’s tastes. I mean, look how ponderously Charlton Heston (as the greybeaded Moses) speaks. That was the style then and it worked fine. Doesn’t work as well now.
So I can see a remake.
What I can’t see is a remake that screws with the story.
The Ten Commandments was itself a remake man.