Exodus: Gods and Kings is the rare film that gets me to theater. Christian Bale and Ridley Scott are two names I like in cinema and I'm not anti Joel Edgerton either. However the main reason is that I like (and believe in) the story of Moses and Aaron and how they saved the Jewish people from Pharoah's cruelties.
However, as Noah, this one was dissapointing in the fact that religious aspects were kind of dimmed by choice. In this day and age where cinema can better show God's miracles, the directors are after making action or pschological thrillers. And this one is the former. There are the miracles of course (it is hard to avoid them in the story) but they are kind of explained by scientific terms and there is even a suggestion that the God's messages were Moses' hallucinations (after hitting his head on the way to the mountain).
I'm a religious person but of the live and let live kind and I don't mind the interpretations or the choices of the director but I wanted to watch a bona fide religious miracle film where Moses and Aaron beats Pharoah with God's miracles and the Red Sea opening up and swallowing the bad guys. Well the Red Sea here has receded as a tide and then risen again. But I was hoping more like the animations in The Prince of Egypt where the sea is divided into two etc. And also I wanted to see Moses' staff eating the magicians tricks up and his hand becoming all white and luminous. Anyway I didn't fall asleep or anything and the acting was fine but all in all I was not satisfied. It just was not a good film you know. Not like, say, Gladiator where one roots for Maximus and gets caught up in the story. I think Moses and Aaron deserved better.
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