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“It’s not even that good a story,” Moses grumbles early on in Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” shortly after learning of the mysterious events that transformed a lowly Hebrew slave into a full-blown prince of Egypt. It’s a sly, knowing wink from a filmmaker who clearly has a terrific tale on his hands, yet faces a bit of a challenge in selling it to a more cynical, less easily razzle-dazzled audience than those that greeted the biblical epics of yesteryear. What’s remarkable about Scott’s genuinely imposing Old Testament psychodrama is the degree to which he succeeds in conjuring a mighty and momentous spectacle — one that, for sheer astonishment, rivals any of the lavish visions of ancient times the director has given us — while turning his own skepticism into a potent source of moral and dramatic conflict.
If this estimable account of how God delivered His people out of Egypt feels like a movie for a decidedly secular age, its searching, non-doctrinaire approach arguably gets closer to penetrating the mystery of faith than a more fawning approach might have managed. Like “Noah,” the year’s other nonconformist Judeo-Christian blockbuster, this is an uncommonly intelligent, respectful but far-from-reverent outsider’s take on Scripture, although “Exodus” is less madly eccentric and more firmly grounded in the sword-and-sandal tradition than Darren Aronofsky’s film, and will almost certainly prove less polarizing among believers. Even with a hefty $140 million pricetag and a two-and-a-half-hour running time to overcome, Fox’s year-end release (opening Dec. 12 Stateside) should ride 3D ticket premiums and general curiosity to muscular returns worldwide, landing closer to “Gladiator” than “Kingdom of Heaven” territory in terms of audience satisfaction and commercial payoff.
If there’s a controversial talking point here, it’s that Scott’s film continues the dubious tradition of casting white actors in an English-language picture set at the meeting point of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the injustice of yet another major historical drama ceding the big roles to Hollywood royalty while relegating blacks, Arabs and other actors of color to the background: In addition to Christian Bale’s star turn as Moses, “Exodus” features Joel Edgerton as his stepbrother, Ramses — a transformation made reasonably convincing through state-of-the-art bronzing techniques and heavy applications of guyliner (plus the exquisitely bejeweled costumes designed by Janty Yates). Yet while these are problematic choices, dictated by commercial imperatives as old as Methuselah, they are also reservations one willingly suspends as the strength of the performances and the irresistible pull of the story take hold.
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