Exodus: Gods and Kings and How Reality Continues to Fade into Fantasy

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2014

Exodus: Gods and Kings is an epic movie depicting the fictitious tale of the biblical rise of Moses, a man that saved a large number of Hebrew people, his people, from their Egyptian slave owners, under the guidance of the God of Abraham.  The movie is filled with massive battle scenes, sickening plagues and long walks through deserts.  It’s a movie about one man’s journey toward purpose, to find meaning in his life.  What does it mean to be alive and what am I to do to contribute while in this life?   Like Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Moses is forced to take sides and fight for the survival of his people.  He has to fight the very group of people that raised him and treated him like one of their own.

Ridley Scott’s epic film, sadly fails at achieving the greatness that his Roman Empire film Gladiator did.  Similarly, Gladiator tells the story of man that was a general and confidante to the Roman Emperor, a man the Emperor wished could succeed him but understood that blood succeeds blood and Maximus wasn’t blood.  Exodus takes this same route where the Pharaoh of Egypt, Seti could envision Moses as his successor upon his death, rather than his less king-like son Ramses.  Moses was exiled because Ramses, the new Pharaoh discovers he’s of Hebrew blood, a breed of people heavily believed by the Egyptians at a dirty inferior race of people.  Maximus was exiled because back-stabbing Commodus, the new Roman Emperor, jealous of Maximus' relationship with his father, had him sent away to be killed.  Both met had soldiers sent by the current king to kill their families.  Both men lingered in remote desperate locations while their respective executioners prospered as new leaders.  Both men would later return to their homeland to defeat the man that destroyed their lives by fighting them in one last epic battle, with both hero and enemy facing off.

The problem is Exodus ended up lacking the emotional investment that all films need to carry their audience through a journey.  Unlike Maximus, there was very little emotional attachment toward Moses to go alone with him on his journey, as a result the battles where flat and the payoff wasn’t satisfying.  By the time Frodo left the Shire in The Fellowship of the Ring, we cared about him.  When he was forced to confront evil in Middle Earth we worried for him.  We wanted him to gain the courage that was asked of him to get rid of the Ring once and for all.  In Exodus this feeling of wanting Moses to win in the end wasn’t really worth the almost three hours that was required of the audience to follow him to the Promised Land.  

Just after the Israelite Moses’ birth, a command by the Pharaoh of Egypt has gone out to kill all male Hebrew babies by throwing them in the Nile River.  Here, baby Moses was placed in a basket and sent down the river.  The Pharaoh’s daughter found the crying baby while taking a bath and adopted him.  Moses grew up in Egypt, but remained sympathetic toward the Hebrew slaves.  He would often stand up for them, even in some cases killing their Egyptian merciless guards to defend them.  After being exposed as a Hebrew, Moses roams the desert, searching for food and meaning for his nomadic life.  He wanders in a village for water where he meets and marries the beautiful Zipporah and works as a shepherd for his father-in-law.

During a rain storm Moses climbs a mountain forbidden for all to climb.  It is believed that mountain belongs to the God of Abraham and shall remain untouched.  Moses at this point in the story, an atheist, climbs the mountain anyway to collect wandering sheep when he happens upon a burning bush, a bush that burns but yet doesn’t burn up.  He is told by God, in the film appearing in the form of a young boy, to lead his people out of Egypt “into a good and spacious land, a land flowing of milk and honey.”  Moses provides God with a number of excuses why he should not be the one to do this but then he eventually agrees and obeys God’s wishes.

Moses returns to the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses and pleads that he “Let my people go”.  Ramses refuses and intensifies the workload of his Israelite slaves.  The Old Testament God then takes wrathful matters into his own hands and sends a series of plagues to Egypt in the form of frogs, locusts, hail, darkness, and more.  Ramses resisted plague after brutal plague even though his country was in turmoil while the land where the Israelites lived was spared.  Ramses ends up being Moby Dick’s stubborn Ahab character in some way, where he never knows when enough is enough.  He’s a man consumed by power and legacy and is free of any compassion toward humanity as a whole.

The last plague that God unleashed upon Egypt was to strike down all the firstborn in all human and livestock families.  The Israelites prepared ahead of time by washing their doorways with lambs blood so God would pass over their homes with no harm.  This allegorical event would later institute the Jewish celebration of Passover.  Ramses’ son died in his crib along with many other firstborn thus convincing the Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave his lands for good.  

Moses directs his people away from Egypt toward the Promised Land, but not too long before the Pharaoh changes his mind and follows them, desiring to leave non alive.  Moses leads his people across the Red Sea that God allowed him to part, in the case of the movie; receded, so they can be free of their Egyptian pursuers.  By the time the Israelites make it the other side, God lets the Red Sea flow again, resulting in the deaths of all the Egyptians in their chariots.  The movie had a big showdown between Moses and Ramses, swords in hand before a massive tidal wave engulfed them and separated them, leaving Moses on the side of the Israelites and Ramses on the side of thousands of dead Egyptian soldiers beached by the giant wave.
     

For many years Moses leads his people in circles in order for the old complainers, the ones that wish to return to Egypt and live out their days as slaves, to die off.  The hope here is for the new generation to start fresh.  God had the group stop at Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain so he could lay down his laws of the land as well as plans for construction of a tabernacle, which become a precursor to the temple.  Moses receives the Ten Commandments on tablets for the people to live by.  In the film he writes the commandments through God’s will rather than the lightening carving we might be used to from the Charlton Heston starring, Cecil B. DeMille directed film The Ten Commandments. 

Exodus is a failed project on a massive scope but not without some good scenes.  It attempted to endear us to the plight of Moses but instead, through horrible casting and plastic looking armor, never let us get caught up in its fantasy, where a film like Gladiator did.  Exodus seemed disorganized and confused about what direction and what themes it wanted to convey.  The film might have been in better hands of a religious director rather than a secular one.

The problem here is the story isn’t real but yet a great number of people in our modern society believes it is.  The film attempts to balance realism and the expectations of a massive group of people that believe this story to be true, into one cohesive narrative.  It fails by trying to please both sides of the ongoing debate of whether there is a God that is the creator of us all, or whether we evolved from apes into the species we are now and simply made up a God.

Now any mindful person knows we did make it all up.  We as a species are among billions but yet are seemingly prisoners in our own minds.  The creation of God provides a unifying force that serves as a community and security in a confusing universe.  It allows us to cheat death, an inevitable demise we all wish to avoid.  The stories of the bible were written by groups of people that wanted to invent a mythology, about their history that didn’t resemble the truth, but rather justified the actions of misguided people into believing that their motives were just.  This fictional form of storytelling allowed fathers to tell their sons about how much they are heroes.  You never hear of a tribe of people telling their young ones they are monsters that kill and prey on the weak.  No father wants his son to know that he’s afraid; he wants his son to know that he’s brave so the son will in turn mimic that bravery.  Fathers never tell their sons about how they have sliced the throats of unsuspecting men.  They tell them that they fought for some sort of freedom, some form of righteousness.  Basically we lie, we lie about our demons by telling fabrications of the events to suit whatever agenda we want our followers to believe.  

  

This is the hard truth about the story of men.  We want to be seen as something we are not; we want to justify our actions by distorting reality.  The truth is; we are animals that have the conscious ability to think for ourselves but are scared to death of the world outside our field of sight.  We fear the Other, we fear difference but ultimately, we fear ourselves.  We are the enemy not them, whoever they might be.  The real enemy is the ghost in the machine that tells you things about yourself, and your abilities that is contrary to the beliefs and the rituals that you have been indoctrinated into, in your particular society.

These biblical stories provide a fictional basis for us to live our real lives by.  They are often beautifully written by ghostwriters and convey many levels of morality that one ought to live their life by.  The problem here though is so much of this book is not only lost in translation, it is old enough to ignite the imaginations of limited thinking people to believe that what is written, are the words of a God.  This all still goes back to scared people that are afraid to put the work into enlightenment.  They instead seek fast-food sensibility where being told what to think becomes their warm blanket in an often cold world, this form of cowardice is equal to that of hiding under the bed when the wind blows, or seeking refuge in a closet because a shadow along the wall moved.  Scientists are the most grown up among us.  Religious believers are the children that never grew up emotionally while reality began to creep into their world as they got older; causing the very fear that perpetuates and sustains their religious fantasy in the first place.