I can’t sleep on planes, okay?
Doesn’t matter how long the flight is, or how much I want to do it, I just can’t manage to sleep on planes. The problem cropped up again for me this summer, as I was flying back and forth from my home here in the sunny United States to the International Medieval Congress in the not-so-sunny United Kingdom.
I point this out not to seek pity, but to seek forgiveness. Because when it was 4am over the middle of an ocean and I hadn’t slept and I’d watched all the in-flight movies that were any good… well, I broke down and watched Gods of Egypt.
To be honest, a part of me really wanted to like this movie. Revealing the ways that the annual Nile Flood , as a representation of the death and resurrection cycle, served as an intersection point for Egyptian civilization and belief—showing how complete and coherent a system it was—is always a favorite teaching moment for me in my mythology courses. And even in my fiction I am deeply engaged with this material. Fans of my historical fantasy series The Shards of Heaven know how Cleopatra and the Ptolemaic dynasty endeavored to splice the realities of their rule with the trappings of the traditional Egyptian pantheon.
What I’m saying is I like Egyptian mythology.
So when I pressed play on my in-flight entertainment system I was even willing to hold my nose through the disgraceful whitewashing that I’d heard about the movie, if it could manage to offer a useful glimpse at anything resembling a fascinating ancient system of belief.
Hell, I would’ve gone for just being entertained, in that moment.
Alas, the movie gave me none of that. Gods of Egypt is a disaster from top to bottom, from the middle to the side. It was such a bad movie that it never even reached the heights of being a good bad movie—the kind of bad film you can enjoy by pouring a drink and laughing at its badness. Instead, this was a cringe-fest. The only reason I finished it was that I had nothing else to watch aside from the other people on the plane.
And most folks find that a little sketchy.
Fortunately, now that I’ve watched it, you won’t have to. I took the bullet arrow for y’all. I know it’s hardly “medieval,” but if you’d like to know what was so bad about this movie, let me count the ways.
The Whitewashing
I said I thought I might be able to ignore this issue, but it turned out to be so much worse than I could have imagined.
Remember, Gods of Egypt is a film supposedly about the gods of Egypt. The leading cast members brought together by Director Alex Proyas to make this vision a reality?
- Gerard Butler plays Set, god of the desert. He was born in Paisley, Scotland.
- Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays Horus, god of the sky. He’s Danish.
- Rachael Blake plays Isis, goddess of health and marriage. She’s Australian.
- Bryan Brown plays Osiris, god of change and regeneration. He’s another Australian.
- Elodie Yung plays Hathor, goddess of love and joy. She’s French-Cambodian.
- Geoffrey Rush plays Ra, god of the sun. He’s Australian, too.
- Even the two mortal heroes, Brenton Thwaites as Bek and Courtney Eatin as Zaya, are Australian.
Indeed, nobody of note in this film is Egyptian or anything even close to it. In the midst of this totally whitewashed cast the filmmakers then decided to add a single African-American in Chadwick Boseman, who plays Thoth, god of wisdom. I rather enjoyed his performance, yet this seemingly token attempt to show casting diversity really only serves to underscore how secondary Egypt and the Egyptians and indeed anything not of-the-West is to this movie about the gods of Egypt.
In fact, the only people who looked to be authentically Egyptian in this film were the subservient masses of mortals who exist on the screen only to worship their Great White Gods. Watching it was mightily uncomfortable.
Mythology in a Blender
So sure, Set is a Scotsman. But what of the portrayal of the gods? (Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?)
Pretty horrific. The plot here is loosely based on the core Egyptian myth of Set’s murder of his brother, Osiris, but … well, that sentence is actually about as connected the two plots are.
The real story of Set and Osiris was a representation of the life-giving cycle of the Nile. It goes something like this:
Set, the god of the desert (and thus drought), murders his brother Osiris (here representing the soil-restoring waters of the river) and dismembers him. Osiris’ loyal wife, Isis, seeks to avenge her dead husband by collecting his dispersed parts. She then recruits Thoth, the god of all wisdom, who teaches her the incantations to resurrect him from the dead. She does so, reviving him long enough for them to conceive a child, Horus, who ultimately avenges his father by defeating Set. The drought is banished, the flood of the Nile returns to restore the fertile cropland that is the heart of Egyptian civilization, and the living world is restored under the new reign of Horus as king, with his father Osiris now ruling the afterlife. This myth was symbolically repeated with the annual cycle of the Nile, and it was politically ever-present in the Pharaonic dynasties of Egypt as the current Pharaoh ruled as Horus (or, in Cleopatra’s case, Isis), while the dead Pharaoh ruled in the afterlife as Osiris.
Various versions of the myth exist, with additional twists or details—one of my favorites involves Horus stealing Set’s testicles—but this is a fair outline of the basic form of the Osiris myth.
In this movie? Aussie Osiris is preparing to give his power to the people (in order to promote equality or America or some such, I guess), but then Scottish Set arrives and murders him. Danish Horus, who has been introduced as a kind of playboy among the gods here (in order to show some attractive, mostly naked people, I guess), then challenges Set to a CGI brawl that smashes lots of overly ginormous CGI stuff as the gods shift in and out of their CGI animalistic representations like holy Transformers. Horus loses, has his eyes plucked out, and Set takes over Egypt. Scottish Set’s only opposition is then a human beefcake named Who Cares, who is in love with Of Course She’s Hot. They set off to steal back the eyes of Horus so he can fight Osiris again … because that worked so well the first time.
Ahem.
So in the original myth—which goes back at least 4,000 years—Isis is a central hero, tirelessly searching high and low to restore her husband to life and thus save Egypt.
Here in this 21st-century movie … Aussie Isis gets a cut-scene showing how she tries to lead a resistance against Scottish Set but totally fails because he’s more muscled than she is. The heroes of this CGI Egypt are Danish Horus and Aussie Who Cares.
Yes, Gods of Egypt is whitewashing and manwashing at the same time. Be proud, Hollywood.
The Acting
Even Geoffrey Rush wasn’t very good. And if the acting in your movie is of a level where even the typically delightful Geoffrey Rush doesn’t look good … believe me, the odds of you having better performances from the rest of the cast are dismal.
Not that they can be blamed too much. This was, I imagine, an all-green screen movie—which seems to always lead to lifeless performances—and the writing (by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless), well …
The Thing I Have to Call a “Plot”
Oh gods, this plot was a mess. It was like a twelve-year-old’s D&D campaign on spiked Mountain Dew, lurching from the search for one object or another to fighting one boss battle after another, with no rhyme or reason or basic sense of direction. “Now let’s go to Another Place to find Another Thing … and Lo! Another Beast that has no reason for existing except that in This Moment we need a Threat With Teeth and you’ll need to roll a 20 to get by those Illogically Complex Traps of Terror!”
And then, at the end, oh yeah, it turns out that this One Guy could’ve used The Thing to fix all of the Bad Stuff before but he didn’t really want to do it (I guess?) but now that the Bad Stuff has become Even Worse Stuff and uncounted thousands have died in horrible anguish he’ll just go ahead and fix it all … presumably because the film’s budget just wouldn’t allow for the CGI Dudes to invent any more Big Monsters of Chaos and Doom.
What I’m saying, in more theoretical terms, is that this bad-from-the-beginning movie ended with the worst kind of Deus ex Machina in a film full of them.
I Just Can’t…
So I pretty much loathed this movie, and I hate to say that. I like many of these actors. Some of the CGI looked cool once you set aside the inanity of it all. And I’m sure that a lot of well-meaning people had to put in a lot of really hard work to complete a project of this scale.
But yikes, was it bad. And while you might love to keep hearing about the myriad ways it absolutely failed for me, that would honestly require me to keep thinking about it.
And I just can’t.
Verdict: 1/10 Eyes of Horus.
Michael Livingston is a Professor of Medieval Literature at The Citadel who has written extensively both on medieval history and on modern medievalism. The Gates of Hell, the follow-up to The Shards of Heaven, his historical fantasy series set in Ancient Rome, comes out this fall from Tor Books.
Galaxy Quest…ahh, such a good movie.
IDK, I still want to see it. It looks mythdark and Dark City is one of my favorite films of all time.
Galaxy Quest FTW
Are there enough Coptic actors available to cast such a film with ethnic accuracy? I could be wrong, but my understanding is that they are a very oppressed people, and in the years since the fall of the military dictatorship in Egypt things have only gotten worse (the military government was bad for them, but in the period since its fall they’ve been subject to significantly increase hostility and open violence, with little done by the state to protect them).
If they cast Arab Egyptians, they’d be doing just as much a disservice to the historical Egyptians as casting Aussies and Nordics, or even worse, since the Aussies and Nordics didn’t invade and conquer them, leading to centuries of oppression and persecution, and nobody who sees an Australian or Danish or Scottish actor isn’t going to confuse him with an ethnic Egyptian, while I suspect that the average modern viewer knows little or nothing of the difference between Arabs and Egyptians.
I can only sleep on a plane by watching a movie so bad my brain is forced to shut down in self-defense, e.g., one of the Hobbit movies.
Let me start by first saying that I have not watched the movie and will likely not watch it either. Also I am not an Egyptologist but it is my understanding that the Ancient Egyptians were actually quite diverse in their skin tones as there was influence from what we now call the middle east and Libya and Nubia at various times. The base population was however not black as in sub Saharan African black nor white as in northern European white, but were basically tan/brown like many Mediterranean peoples. So if there were too many black actors one could have accused the movie of blackwashing as well. One need only look at various images of Egyptians to see the many shades that they were. It is also my understanding that there is evidence that some of the pharaohs of the 19th dynasty including Ramses the Great had Red hair. All that being said it is also my understanding that the Egyptians themselves focused not on the skin color to define who was Egyptian but on the fact that one accepted Egyptian culture. I would also point out that the vast majority of the Egyptian gods also had the heads of animals making the portrayal by any actor without make-up or CGI covering the head inaccurate no matter whether white, black or other.
Watching this movie made me miss the sort of fine performances and respect for myth & history found in the Clash/Wrath of the Titans remakes.
Well, it’s hard to say what ethnic accuracy would look like in this movie, but I think we can all agree that milky white Danish, Aussies and Scots definitely don’t cut the mustard. All facial reconstructions I have seen of the Egyptians make them look like your average Caribbean mixed-race person: shades of brown, some with curlier hair than others, some more “Caucasoid” looking than others. They mingled freely with other peoples –since the whole race thing hadn’t been invented yet– so I’m sure they could have a whole variety of traits, including the occasional blonde, and a lot of people with darker skin. Never Danish, for the love of Pete.
(Speaking of ethnic accuracy, if I have to deal with yet another ignoramus who chooses to believe that Cleopatra was black, I’ll have to cut my wrists.)
bahweh, people don’t have to be pale to have red hair. Brown people have red hair too.
Anything but the lily-white cast would have been more accurate. Obviously, a civilisation that existed thousands of years ago cannot be accurately portrayed regarding ethnicity. You’re going to be hard pushed to find some “pure” descendants. But for the love of the gods cast brown people! We might not know exactly what they looked like but we can be pretty sure they wouldn’t look like the descendants of Danes, or Saxons, or any other Germanic tribe.
The Mummy films did a better job of portraying Ancient Egyptians. At least Rachel Weisz was only supposed to be half Egyptian.
If you go by the official portraits of the Pharaohs, just pick anybody who strongly resembles ancestors of theirs who lived anywhere along the Nile or in the Levant and you’ll have a correct mix. Also according to temple art, the deities whose oldest temples are upstream should be played by black people; downstream, Middle Easterners.
Egypt has been a nation, unified more often than not, for almost 5,000 years, a destination for traders and people looking for a better life, and of course slaves. Also it was an empire for part of that time–and invaded, or possibly just opportunistically occupied, multiple times. With all of the immigration going on, there never was a single Egyptian appearance. I think the Pharaonic Egyptians themselves would have identified anybody who dressed, spoke, worshiped, ate, etc., in a properly Egyptian way as a resident of the Black Land and othered anybody who acted foreign, even if they looked like twins.
But speaking of dressing Egyptian style. Oh my Cecil B. DeMille, the costuming for this notional blockbuster is awful. Just once, just flipping once I want to see people onscreen in the clothes they actually wore, not this shiny polyester nonsense. Upper-class Egyptians looked awesome. These getups look like something from a stage production in Las Vegas.
And speaking of looking awesome, if there ever was a historical fantasy that could benefit from gobs of CGI, it would have been this one. Egyptian monsters were utterly bizarre, Giger meets Disney, from the backward-headed nightwalkers to the walking snakes, great devouring fiery serpents, etc., etc. Just, you know, give them a plot to exist in. Also I get more of a Dune vibe than an Egyptian one from that still up there.
And if I got started on what they did to the glorious bloody sexy heartbreaking romantic myth that was perfectly fine as it was, dammit, I’d be typing all night. Isis. Just…Isis.
Porphyrogenitus @@.-@:
If they cast Arab Egyptians, they’d be doing just as much a disservice to the historical Egyptians as casting Aussies and Nordics …
Modern-day Egyptians (whatever their religion) would probably be a pretty reasonable representation of ancient Egyptians (who, of course, had various waves of invaders come in and conquer them before the Arabs did). The Arab invasions introduced an Arab ruling class and an Arabic-speaking culture, which the Egyptians gradually adopted, to the point that about 90% of Egyptians are Arabic-speaking Muslims, with another 10% being Arabic-speaking Coptic Christians. (“Coptic” is basically a religious designation: Christians who use Coptic liturgy, but speak Arabic as their daily language.)
Casting modern-day Egyptians as ancient Egyptians would be about as much of a “disservice” as casting modern-day English actors to play ancient pre-Christian Britons (as done for, e.g., the 2003 movie Boudica).
(One could, I suppose, argue that casting “Coptic” actors would be a “disservice” to ancient Egyptian religious sensibilities, since it was the Christians who suppressed what was left of ancient Egyptian religion, before the Muslims even showed up…)
Jenny Islander @@@@@ 10:
But speaking of dressing Egyptian style. Oh my Cecil B. DeMille, the costuming for this notional blockbuster is awful. Just once, just flipping once I want to see people onscreen in the clothes they actually wore…
It’s kind of fun to read Kristin Thompson’s discussion of the Egyptian stylistic and historical mishmash that was Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. (Thompson is both an Egyptologist and a film theorist, and so eminently qualified for the task.)
(And appropos of whitewashed casting: “… it’s hard to think of Christian Bale and especially Joel Edgerton as an ancient Canaanite or Egyptian. But to give the film some credit, the moment I saw John Turturro as Sety I, my unexpected reaction was, Wow, he looks like a Ramesside pharaoh. Specifically, like Sety I.”)
I suspect she isn’t going to bother seeing, let alone commenting on, Gods of Egypt.
Dear glori: I am sorry if my reference to red haired Egyptians implied that I thought they were very pale. I am aware that there are darker skinned people with red hair. Malcom X was called Detroit Red due to his reddish hair and Genghis Khan was upset when Kublai Khan did not inherit his red hair. The Mongols have several creation myths but one is that their founder had red hair and green eyes; and the nearby Kyrgyz people have a disproportionate number of redheads to this day as well. There are also small ethnic minorities in southeast Asia that have a disproportionate level of redheads and blondes. Lets face it the concept of Race is a rather modern one and is very imprecise especially if you limit it to the three “classical” categories. It is my understanding that the Ainu (a small minority in the northern island of Japan) have hair texture and growth that is more “Caucasian” with otherwise “Asian” features, also Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians do not fit neatly in any of the three classical categories either. I agree with another commentator that the best portrayal would have been from the modern day Egyptians as the “Arabization” was mainly a language and culture thing as opposed to genetic.
@11 PeterErwin,
They should cast Welsh actors for pre-Saxon or -Norman British, if they want to avoid claims of germano-washing or whatever. If striving for particular accuracy in such things is valuable, then it should be so in all cases, not just fashionable ones.
Coptic is a linguistic, ethnic, and religious designation, not just one or the other.
@10 Jenny: Genuine Ancient Egyptian costumes are awesome but might lead to trouble over the rating as the AEs didn’t share our ideas of modesty. Apparently walking the streets naked was acceptable behavior judging by a wall relief of a market scene where a security monkey (yes literally) has seized a nude thief.
Lord, what a shitstorm of a movie this is.
I wanted to watch something to pass the time and my sister told me this was decent enough. When it was over, she told me she clearly had forgotten it and thought it was much, much better and apologized.
It was awful! Everything was wrong:
– Whitewashing!
– Terrible plot
– Cheap and basic GCI and special effects
– Terrible acting (Why is Rufus Sewell here?) The only one that does something is Chadwick Boseman
– Stupid dialogues
– Cheap and awful costumes, if it isn’t going to be historically accurate, at least make it pretty
– So much male gaze, honestly, much more than the regular movie. All the shots where there was a woman had to be of her breasts.
– The music seemed to be a The Mummy’s rip-off
As @7/hoopmanjh said, this makes me think they should have used Clash of the Titans as a model. It could have been something decent and mildly entertaining, at least!