Gods of Egypt is a film that actually exists. That means director Alex Proyas and other people of considerable stature and wealth unanimously agreed it would be a good idea to make this. And they weren’t even being ironic. They also agreed that their leading actors would be white, despite the movie being set in North fucking Africa. But I don’t see too much point in lamenting what was always going to be an abomination. After seeing the trailer I knew it’d be a worse creature than if Clash of the Titans and Exodus: Gods and Kings produced a love child purely from sodomy. The question is whether this can be enjoyed on a simplistic, leave your brain at the door level.
No. That’s my answer to that. While you’d expect a film that features more CGI than a computer game to at least offer a few moments of excitement, I was finding more entertainment in tending to the inner arse itch I’ve had for the past three days. In fact, I was so unengaged I began to contemplate other things in life, like how ‘Brexit’ sounds like some sort of cereal and that Terminator Genisys made absolutely no sense.
Anyway, during the moments where I wasn’t staring up at the ceiling and hoping that a meteor would plummet down to Earth and end it all, I was able to deduce that Gods of Egypt is a film about gods, set in Egypt. Horus (Nikolaj Costa-Waldau, Game of Thrones) is about to be crowned King by his father Osiris when Gerard Butler’s Set shows up to claim the throne for himself, unleashing the first of many high saturation action sequences, as well as his spectacularly out of place Scottish accent. To really rub it in, he prises Horus’s eyes from their sockets, like a child carelessly playing Operation.
Deciding that he’d quite like to see again, Horus devises a plan to retrieve his eyes and reclaim Egypt with the help of a mortal thief (Brenton Thwaites) who, uninterestingly, is trying to rescue his true love from the afterlife. With all this going on there’s no room for a proper exploration of Egyptian mythology. Instead, it’s like watching the cinematic cutscenes of a horribly animated button-basher with worse dialogue than Pac-Man.
But at least they were successful in making the gods distinguishable from the mortals. They’re all ten feet tall and transform into shiny Power Ranger-come-robot animals whenever someone calls them a prick. Meanwhile, a 50 foot Geoffrey Rush, playing the sun god Ra, is shooting solar beams at a massive toothy worm trying to eat up the world. He also lives on a space boat.
Gods of Egypt is probably the best comedy ever if you’re watching it with a large group of friends and you’re all sniffing glue. But otherwise it’s obviously depressing. The slow motion 360 panning shots they use for every single fight add as much intensity to the scenes as a member of the audience coughing, Gerard Butler should seek employment as an actual butler and oh my god, I’m bored writing about this.
1/5
Words by Chris Edwards
Follow Chris @CMEcontent