Bosomy damsels and
brawny slabs; cheering digital crowds; a lachrymose sphinx; a bedazzled
Geoffrey Rush; a galactic cruise ship; an Egyptian god played by the Dane
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau; the sword-and-sandals enabler Gerard Butler; a smoky
monster that from one angle looks like a fanged doughnut and from another an
alarmingly enraged anus — “Gods of Egypt” attests that they do make them like
they used to, or at least like the King of the Bs, Roger Corman, once did,
except with far more money. If “Gods of Egypt” were any worse, it might be a
masterpiece. It is instead a demented entertainment, an embarrassment of kitsch
riches that, in between inspiring giggles and snorts, incites you to consider
imponderables like, who greenlighted this, and why? Is there really still a
market for would-be spectaculars with cartoonish effects and self-parodying
dialogue delivered with “Downton Abbey” drawls? How does a cast like this take
shape? Did Mr. Rush sign on first and the others follow like lemmings? And how
did Mr. Butler, with his furred musculature and marble-mouthed Scottish accent,
become a standard-bearer for midlevel exploitation cinema? If you have tracked
the career of the director Alex Proyas (“The Crow,” “Dark City” and “I,
Robot”), you may also be wondering what exactly happened here and why.
For years, big movie
companies have been refining the template set by Mr. Corman, who built a long
career with rubber monsters, California Vikings, buckets of blood, and
down-and-dirty marketing and distribution. Yet while the mainstreaming of
exploitation cinema is old news, more notionally respectable movies tend to
tart up their cheap goods with ponderous self-importance and deep-dish ideas.
“Gods of Egypt,” by contrast, doesn’t bother with the fig leaf of
respectability. It floridly lets it all hang out, embracing its vulgar excesses
without justifications or appeals to good taste, which makes it feel more
honest than an art-film exploitation item like “The Revenant.” The rewards of
“Gods of Egypt” are modest and blunt, but they’re also fairly consistent, even
if you’re not stoned. This isn’t to oversell “Gods of Egypt” or to argue that
it’s somehow superior to “The Revenant,” each a favorite pastime of
self-regarding critic-contrarians. Rather, it is to cheerfully admit that I
enjoyed “Gods of Egypt” despite the lazily generic non-story, the dubious
Eurocentric casting and (intentionally?) unconvincing effects that make you
wonder (another imponderable) why they didn’t just make this an animated
picture. As is often the case in many midlevel and even pricier movies of this
type, the more that filmmakers try to reproduce or fabricate entire worlds
inside a computer, the less persuasive the results are. As is also often true,
the aerial views and crowd shots are particularly unnatural and unattractive,
and have none of the painterly beauty of Hollywood’s classical-era backdrops.
The visual style of Mr.
Proyas’s earlier features, with their pools of inky black and boldly defined
forms, isn’t much in evidence in “Gods of Egypt.” His more memorable work has a
near-hieroglyphic lucidity, summoning up fields of meaning in a single shot, as
with the eerie, fedora-wearing Strangers in “Dark City” and the romantic goth
hero at the center of “The Crow.” It’s always an open question as to what kind
of control a director has in an endeavor like “Gods of Egypt.” But it’s
instructive that even as this movie teases you with its absurdity, it also
offers you moments of beauty that shimmer like the outstretched wings of a
goddess and moments of wit that surface in a hideaway wittily populated by
duplicates of the same god, who’s having a ball talking to himself and himself
and himself….
