Review #1,048: 'Gods of Egypt' (2016)

Alex Proyas's return to directing following a 7 year hiatus couldn't have come at a worse time. Just as the film industry was up in arms about the #OscarSoWhite debacle, Gods of Egypt arrived in cinemas boasting a near-all Caucasian cast despite being set in Africa. The demand for diversity in Hollywood duly followed, and rightly so, but the questionable casting isn't even the worst thing about the film. Gods of Egypt is a bloated, garish and nonsensical piece of trash, the cinematic equivalent of Raheem Sterling's bathroom. Is this really the same visionary who brought us The Crow (1994) and Dark City (1998)?

Sadly it is, and it completes a steady quality decline in Proyas's output which began in 2004 with his middle-finger to Isaac Asimov, I, Robot. On paper, the big-budget tale of Gods living amongst humans battling it out for the throne may seem like the perfect the opportunity for some campy, brain-on-auto-pilot fun. However, it fails to even offer any sort of camp appeal due to a cast either gobbled up by the video-game cutaway special effects or so utterly devoid of charisma. The main offender is Brenton Thwaites, a young actor who looks like he's been custom-built to appeal to any teenage girls in the crowd. He plays Bek, a human living in a thriving Egypt governed by ten-foot Gods, and sadly he is our protagonist.

Bek, along with his pretty girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton), witnesses the handing-over of the crown from the abdicating Osiris (Bryan Brown) to his dashing and popular son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). The coronation is rudely interrupted by Osiris's uncle Set (Gerard Butler), who feels that the time has come for him to rule, killing his brother and ripping out his poor nephew's eyes in front of a terrified crowd. With the Egyptians forced into slavery to satisfy Set's greed and vanity, Bek, a talented thief, swipes the plans to Set's vault in the hope of stealing back Horus's eyes and assisting him in defeating his uncle. But when Zaya is killed after the successful theft, Bek strikes a deal with Horus to help guide him through Set's pyramid in exchange for returning Zaya from the underworld.

The main question lingering over the head of Gods of Egypt is why was this film made? For a modern blockbuster from a talented director, the film lacks maturity and brains. For a film possibly designed to appeal to fans of explosion-heavy sci-fi/fantasy extravaganzas such as Michael Bay's Transformers franchise, the CGI is often embarrassingly bad. And for anybody hoping for a throwback to the kitschy B-movies of the 1950's and 60's, where giant monsters and grotesque gods mingled with us puny humans, you will find more charm in one frame of any movie involving the work of Ray Harryhausen than you will for the entire 2 hours of Gods of Egypt. The whole thing just feels oddly out of place, paling in comparison to even the most sickly of recent CGI-fests. Re-telling essentially the exact same story told a thousand times since Homer put ink to paper, this could be re-titled as A Simpleton's Guide to the Hero's Quest. Utter tripe.


Directed by: Alex Proyas
Starring: Brenton Thwaites, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Gerard Butler, Courtney Eaton, Elodie Yung, Chadwick Boseman, Rufus Sewell, Geoffrey Rush, Bryan Brown
Country: USA/Australia

Rating: *

Tom Gillespie