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'Exodus: Gods And Kings,' With Christian Bale As Moses, Gets Long Trailer

This article is more than 9 years old.

As makes sense since 20th Century Fox's Gone Girl is about to drop in theaters on Friday, Fox has released this full trailer for Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings. The picture, due December 12th, is basically a "battle-ifcation" of the story we all learned about in Sunday school and/or watched in The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt. What I mean about "battle-ifcation" is that it is the latest example of taking a popular and/or mythic story and finding a way to insert mass battles and scenes of conventional action heroics into the mix, at least in the amount that can fill up a trailer. So here we have Christian Bale riding into battle and stabbing people with swords, and a closing montage that resembles any number of big-scale action epics from the post-Braveheart era. Fair or not, it does feel like the most base form of patronizing, attempting to convince general moviegoers that stories like Sleeping BeautySnow White, or Alice in Wonderland are now filled with hardcore action heroics. Say what you will about Oz: The Great and Powerful, but Sam Raimi's prequel at least avoided that specific cliche.

The other issue at hand is of course the explicitly white actors playing explicitly Middle Eastern roles. All due respect to the likes of Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, and Aaron Paul, but they presumably don't resemble whatever Moses and Ramses and company looked like back in the proverbial day. The film has faced accusations of "whitewashing" since the beginning and it's a tough charge to dispute when you see white actors made up not that differently from the days when John Wayne played Genghis Khan. The film will or won't work on its own artistic merits of course, but I still find it a bit baffling that an industry now dead-set on maximizing worldwide box office doesn't make more of an effort to cast actors of appropriate ethnicity even when the story explicitly calls for it. This conversation will only intensify as the film's release approaches, so that can wait for another day.

Casting politics aside, the trailer is noteworthy in that it's over three-minutes long, which means it gives away quite a bit of spectacle and story. Now of course pretty much everyone knows the major story beats and the climactic pay-offs, so I suppose it makes sense to show off Ridley Scott's specific interpretation of said events, but the trailer really does leave nothing to the imagination. Come what may, 2014 really is the year of the high-profile religious movie, with Nicolas Cage's Left Behind reboot dropping this very week. There is money to be made with these kind of films, both in having potent source material for which to frame your mega-budget action spectacle and in being able to draw in the kinds of people who otherwise might not make that trip to the multiplex.

Ironically, as Paramount's Noah realized earlier this year as it lost some of its hardcore faithful audience to God's Not Dead (at least over opening weekend, although $44m towards and eventual $359m worldwide total is nothing to sneeze at), the danger isn't in not being sufficiently faithful to the hardcore religious element but rather in facing direct competition from lower-budget entries designed explicitly to play to the hardcore Christian religious crowd.  So yes, the battle for the heart of the Christian moviegoer is something of a David and Goliath battle. The last thing Fox wants on December 12th is a Heaven is For Real type release nipping at its heels to steal away the uber-faithful.

Having said all of that, we can all still hope that Exodus: Kings and Gods merely works as a glossy, well-acted epic spectacular. Bale is always worth watching, and Ridley Scott usually delivers on the razzle-dazzle. I like Gladiator less than most film critics and frankly adore Kingdom of Heaven (both versions actually, although the director's cut is indeed superior), but both films delivered in the acting and spectacle front. It will be interesting to see what additional nuances can be plucked from one of the oldest stories around. And, as Mark Hughes will surely attest (here and here), it is not a little funny that Hollywood has now climbed aboard the Bible-adaptation train, having spent the last 15 years building their tents on superhero stories that pertain to be the modern-day myths with roots themselves in the religious dogma (Superman = Moses). All of these disparate elements will frankly make Exodus: Gods and Kings one of the more interesting films to watch this December. As always, we'll see.

 

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