After Darren Aronofskys Noah became one of the most divisive films of 2014, ruffling both religious viewers and hardcore cinephiles, Ridley Scotts Exodus: Gods and Kings was always going to arrive carrying a second wave of the same argument. Scotts version centres the story on the rivalry between Moses, played by Christian Bale, and Ramses, rather than on the familiar set pieces most audiences expect from the Exodus story.
That departure was the films central problem for a lot of Christian viewers. Moses wields a sword rather than a staff for much of the film, Aaron barely speaks, the burning bush and staff-to-snake moments are minimised, and the film skips the familiar beats, the repeated let my people go, the infant Moses adrift on the Nile, that most adaptations treat as obligatory. None of that makes the film inaccurate exactly, Exodus 1-14 leaves plenty of room for interpretation, but it does make Gods and Kings a harder sell to audiences expecting something closer to Cecil B. DeMilles 1956 The Ten Commandments, still the films inevitable point of comparison.
The film drew a separate line of criticism for casting white actors in the lead Egyptian roles while non-white actors filled slave and servant roles, a choice widely read as tone-deaf regardless of the films other merits. Scott, an atheist by his own account, and Bale, who described Moses in interviews as possibly schizophrenic and barbaric, gave sceptical Christian audiences little reason to extend the film the benefit of the doubt going in.
Whether Gods and Kings deserved the near-instant dismissal it got from a lot of churchgoing audiences is a fair question. It is not a devotional film and was never trying to be one. Its failures are mostly craft failures, an overstuffed script credited to four writers, spectacle that outpaces character, rather than failures of reverence. That distinction tends to get lost in these arguments, and its worth holding onto: a biblical epic can be a bad film without being an act of disrespect toward the material.
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