Exodus: Gods and Kings’s source material requires no spoiler alert for audiences with even the vaguest familiarity with the Old Testament story of Moses and the exodus of enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt. But Ridley Scott’s interpretation of the story takes some provocative and often terrifying risks. What are we to make of these Gladiator-esque excesses, especially when applied to the pinnacle of slave liberation stories? Let’s just say Scott’s film makes The Ten Commandments seem as utterly camp as the Easter bunny.

It’s around 1300 B.C.E. and Egypt’s Pharoah Seti (John Turturro) is getting old and sick. His heir-apparent Ramses, played here by a very good Joel Edgerton, is more like a spoiled glam-rock star, complete with guyliner and python scarves a la Britney Spears, than a future king. Christian Bale is Moses, whose militaristic prowess and skepticism of the mystical would make him more suited to the throne — if only he wasn’t a foundling. The two brothers are soon thrust onto the battlefield against the Hittites; during the war, Moses saves Ramses’s life, as per a foreboding prophecy. Moses then travels to Pithom to survey the squalor of the overworked Hebrew slaves for himself. In a woefully brief performance by Ben Kingsley, the elder Nun informs Moses of his Hebrew origins and his larger destiny: leading Israel out of Egypt. When word of Moses’ true ancestry reaches Ramses and his mother (Sigourney Weaver in a blink’s worth of screen time), they are more than ready to send this child of Abraham into exile.

Moses wanders the desert until he chances upon a shepherding town. He finds a wife in Zipporah (María Valverde), and together they have a son. Moses is given nine years of peace and comfort in domesticity, until that fateful day some stray goats lead him up to the forbidden mountain. This is when Scott’s plot starts to deviate from the familiar story, into the realm of artistic license.

Moses’ encounter with the burning bush is staged bleakly like something out of a Samuel Beckett play: a storm causes a rockslide that buries the prophet head-to-toe in mud — only his face remains visible, sticking out of the black sludge, as he convenes with God.

Exodus’s God is literally a vengeful, petulant child (Isaak Andrews) who quarrels frequently with a very reluctant, yet loyal Moses. This is a Child-God who tells Moses, “I need a general.” This is a Child-God who claims retribution over the Egyptians by killing the first-born child of every Egyptian family. This is a Child-God who kills other children while smirking knowingly at Moses, who is torn between his love for his people and his love for the people who raised him; we see Bale wince at the howling wails of bereaved fathers and mothers in the early dawn.

Furthermore, the film seems to enjoy toying with the idea that this Moses’s God might be the stuff of a schizophrenic delusion. Are these postmodern indictments of religion, or are they just embarrassingly amateurish, unconscious Gladiatorizations of a Biblical story?

These are all terrifying and ballsy choices that will undoubtedly offend and/or tantalize. When you start to view this film as a corollary to current, real-world situations (as scholars already have with Ridley’s post-911 film Kingdom of Heaven), things start to get even dicier. But this is what worthy cinema ought to do: incite passions, inquiry and deeper criticism. 

3.5 out of 5 stars
Rated PG-13. Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring John Turturro, Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton. Now playing.

This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2014.