“Gods of Egypt” is kind of a junky movie, but not an unenjoyable one. It’s a sword-and-sandals fantasy epic that tries to follow on the financial success of the “Clash of the Titans” and “Thor” movies, but without the A-list stars or first-rate CGI. Despite its schlocky aspects, I couldn’t bring myself to hate the film and even enjoyed it on some puckish level.
Frankly, this is the sort of flick that would’ve made a prime pick for “Mystery Science Theater 3000” ridicule back in the day.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”) plays Horus, the god of air, who’s about to be crowned king of all Egypt after his father Ra decides to step down. In this postulation, the gods are 8-foot-tall super-powered beings who dwell among the humans and rule them, but are still flawed and mortal.
Then his uncle, the power-mad Set (Gerard Butler), usurps the throne and kills Ra and a bunch of others. Horus has his eyes plucked out, robbing him of his unerring aim, and is banished. Then a young human thief named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) steals an eye from Set, kicking off a series of events that includes full-scale war between the gods.
This is essentially another superhero movie, with many of the same dynamics at play. Horus is a good but vain god, and must learn to lead humans instead of lording it over them.
Director Alex Proyas (“Dark City”) and screenwriters liberally borrow elements from other movies and insert them here, including sand snakes straight from “Dune” and gods who transform into metallic form for battle a la Iron Man. If you’re looking for originality, look elsewhere.
But if you’re willing to watch something ironically, I think you’ll find “Gods of Egypt” has a bounty of riches waiting to be tapped.
Bonus features are decent, though you’ll have to get the Blu-ray edition to possess most of them. The DVD comes with only two making-of featurettes, “The Battle for Eternity: Stunts” and “A Window into Another World: Visual Effects.”
With the Blu-ray you add four more featurettes on costumes and makeup, shooting on location in Australia, the cast and the overall vision, plus storyboards.
"Gods of Egypt" is the sort of thing you're tempted to laugh out loud at -- and believe me, I did, several times -- but I can't bring myself to hate it. It's the sort of goofy disposable entertainment that seems self-aware of its nature, embraces it and has fun with it.
We've had big-budget spectacles featuring the Greek/Roman pantheon of deities as well as the Norse ones via the Thor movies, so now it's the Egyptians' turn. Because everyone was demanding a Horus/Set throwdown, right?
Director Alex Proyas is known for this sort of thing -- "Dark City," "The Crow" and similar middle-brow adventures in the fantasy/science fiction wing. At $140 million, it approaches triple the budget of "Deadpool," though the CGI, while extensive, often has that cheap shallow texture endemic to cut-rate/foreign jobs.
I noticed Proyas often cut away from money shots quickly, giving us time to absorb the impact without letting our gaze linger too long to seek imperfections.
The final package is a giddy sandals-and-swords romp that feels like it plucked elements from various other movies. The gods transform into metal warriors, there are sand snakes plucked straight out of "Dune," there's lots of parkour-ish stunts involving flips and contortions that aren't really necessary to get the job done.
Plus the expected quotient of heaving bosoms, comic sidekicks and so on.
The setup here is that in this version ancient Egypt -- script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless -- the gods literally dwelled among the mortals and ruled them. They're eight feet tall, have amazing powers and live a thousand years, but they can certainly be killed and maimed -- and certainly will be over the course of the next 127 minutes.
They're essentially super heroes, dealing with the same-ol' great powers/great responsibility conundrum.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, best known for portraying the morally conflicted Jamie Lanister on "Game of Thrones," plays Horus, the lord of air, known for his keen sight and true aim. As the story opens he's about to be crowned king of Egypt, as daddy Osiris (an oddly uncredited Brian Brown) has reined over peace and prosperity for an eon and is ready to pass the mantle on.
But Uncle Set (Gerard Butler, in full shout-and-flex mode) isn't happy about being banished by father Ra to the wasted desert, and decides it's his turn to rule. He does some Very Bad Things, including plucking out Horus' eyes and banishing him.
Cut to our adorable human facilitator, a young thief named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) whose gorgeous lady love, Zaya (Courtney Eaton), worshiped Horus before his overthrow. She convinces Bek to steal Horus' eyes -- represented as glowing blue jewels -- from the elaborate maze of traps constructed by Set's chief builder (Proyas favorite Rufus Sewell). He manages to snatch one, but Zaya is killed in retaliation.
Bek revives the self-pitying Horus, but with one eye he's only a half-powered god. They set off on a familiar quest for revenge and true love, as Horus promises to rescue Zaya from Anubis' underworld.
Helping out are Hathor (Elodie Yung), the goddess of love who has been joined to both Horus and Set, depending on her need; and Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), the prissy but good-hearted god of knowledge and wisdom.
It's not a particularly Egyptian-looking cast, but there at least is a decent enough mix of ethnicities to pass muster as a multicultural mashup.
I liked Coster-Waldau in the lead role, even though he isn't given much to do other than fight and seethe. He's got an easygoing charisma and likable screen presence. I was glad to see the depiction of a normal male body that's athletic without the usual veiny/engorged look that's become so prevalent.
The movie takes tons of liberties with traditional Egyptian mythology, whipping up all sorts of side characters and events to fit their purposes, and sweeping anything that doesn't fit under the rug. (Look up the recorded conflict between Horus and Set; it was much more, uh, spunky.)
One of the coolest set pieces is Ra's chariot pulling the sun across the sky each day -- in this depiction, the earth is most definitively flat -- doing nightly battle with Apep, the worm of destruction. Played by Geoffrey Rush, Ra is an ancient, remote god who watches the exploits of his descendants below, silently judging but taking no direct action.
The whole sequence is quite majestic and beautiful, which is an amusing contrast with the squirmy, silly stuff happening in the sand. I think if Ra were to weigh this movie on its celestial worth, he'd probably toss it into the trashbin of the cosmos -- but he'd chortle while doing it.
Since winning a Best Actor Oscar 13 years ago, Nicolas Cage has been perhaps the strictest adherent to the “One for me, one for them” school of choosing roles. He’ll do a small, serious film for artistic reasons, like starring in Martin Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead,” and then immediately follow it with a crassly commercial bit of tripe.
I don’t know if it’s cynical, but it’s good way for a star to retain his box office clout while also finding time for more personal projects that don’t generate much heat at the ticket booth. It’s led to some wonderful, offbeat performances in quirky movies that few people saw – go rent “The Weather Man” or “Matchstick Men” for two finer examples – sandwiched in between some absolute bubble-gum dreck: “Ghost Rider,” those “National Treasure” flicks.
After watching “Knowing,” I honestly don’t know which category it falls into.
At first blush, it certainly seems to be a small, intense thriller about a scientist who encounters some disturbing numbers that appear to predict the future. But it builds and builds upon itself, the events taking upon a broader and broader sphere of impact, until the movie reaches juggernaut proportions, with some huge action set-pieces straight out of a summer blockbuster.
The final act may leave some audience members feeling cheated, but I thought director Alex Proyas (“Dark City”) and his quartet of screenwriters earned the outsized ending, slowly and painstakingly ratcheting up the pressure, and the mystery.
Cage plays John Koestler, an M.I.T. scientist who’s raising his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) after the death of his wife. They live in a huge house that was once grand but is deteriorating under their feet. Things seem OK on the surface, but underneath there’s a dry rot to their relationship, too.
The mystery begins when a 50-year-old time capsule is opened at Caleb’s school. All the other kids got a picture drawn by a student from 1959, but Caleb received a page filled with numbers written by a disturbed little girl. John gets hold of the numbers and figures out they indicate the date of every major accident or tragedy over the last five decades, complete with the number of people killed.
Of course, there’s several more dates that have yet to happen, so it’s up to John to try to outpace these prognostications of doom. He tracks down the daughter of the girl who wrote the numbers (Rose Byrne), who has a child of her own. Meanwhile, creepy blonde guys in black overcoats turn up, menacing the children and leaving little black rocks as totems.
“Knowing” veers back and forth between some wonderful moments of tension and menace, but whenever they have to stop and have a long dialogue scene where John puzzles things out, the movie crashes to earth.
Proyas is a great visionary for mood and visuals, but when it comes to the meat-and-potatoes work of moving the plot from point A to B, his direction turns pedestrian. I kept wanting the overcoat guys to show up again to get things back to spooky.
I can’t tell you much about the last half of the movie, since its appeal lies in taking you to unexpected places. Suffice to say that some of it truly is unexpected, and some of it we’ve seen a dozen times before. With “Knowing,” you never quite know what you’re going to get.
