Free Me From the Film Exodus

Exodus: God and Kings slugs along slowly and dismally. With all the CGI effects and familiar battles, not including Ridley Scott’s direction, one might assume some excitement and energy in watching Moses free his people. There is none in the film to speak of.  

The story is familiar to many. Moses, played by Christian Bale, grows up believing he is royalty when in fact he was born a slave.  He eventually frees his people with the help a child-like god.  One of the only interesting elements of the film is that God, at least as Moses sees him, is a child, no more than 9 or 10. This makes perfect sense as the “God” in this story acts like a petulant and immature child. After all, as God, he simply could have avoided all the pain and misery inflicted on all parties without all the gratuitous death and trickery.  I mean, he is God with all the powers of omnipotence and whatever else is conferred upon a deity. And we know he can create, initiate, facilitate (he has a strong hand in the events) a range of terrifying and awesome ‘events.’ Does he not, therefore, have the ability to free the slaves without all the bloodshed?

Consider the killing of the 1^st born child as part of God’s persuasive plan to compel Rameses, played by Joel Ederton, to free those in bondage. If one steps back and logically evaluates this plan, most would find it appalling and frankly immoral.  Why do a lot of innocent children have to die in order to free slaves? Why does the childish God believe this to be a good idea? If he truly loves all people, isn’t it a bizarre thing to kill them?  And what of all the innocent lambs, who are killed so that their blood can be spread across the doors so that the plague can understand that these people are good, sanguineous, but good and thus need to be spared.  God obviously can find no sympathy for the lambs or innocent first born children whose parents decided against bloody commandment. 

But that is problem with the story as a whole, so what can Scott do about that, I suppose.  Still, the film had me thinking about how damn cruel, vicious and immoral the story is without caring a wit about what was happening on the screen. This is not even a film to recommend on video.