(2014. dir: Ridley Scott) You know what I miss about Biblical epics? Technicolor. That immersive, saturated, ultra-bright color of the Ten Commandments that made the blues and reds of Pharoah's palace so sumptuous you could feel the silk against your own skin. When the Nile ran red with the blood of the Hebrew God's plague, it was red like fire-trucks, like finger-paints. When the Plague of the Firstborn crept down from the sky in a green haze, it was greener than seaweed, greener than Kermit the Frog, and the thing itself, with its eerie, distant screams, its smears of lamb's-blood, it was the most eldritch night-scene ever.
In Ridley Scott's version, we begin with a mediocre script, filmed largely in earth-tones, and we get bumped along from one mediocre set-piece to the next without ever growing to care about any of the humans involved. There's a long Hollywood tradition, sure, of jumbling American and English accents together (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Dame Judith Anderson opposite Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price? Seriously? But, in retrospect, how do you not love it?), sticking in one "exotic" actor (Yul Brynner amongst the Wonder Bread), and calling it Egypt. Scott sticks with that (Christian Bale, Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Tara Fitzgerald), and hopes that Joel Edgerton manages to look exotic enough to obscure his Aussie origins. (He doesn't. A blue-eyed pharaoh?)
The night scenes are teal and orange. The most interesting one involves the burning bush, which is all very blue, very LED, and Moses himself is buried in mud with only his face emerging, a fascinating idea, but then Scott brings God out in the figure of a little boy, and again we're lost. In the old days, they knew when to respect the source material. Yeah, MGM gave God a cheesy, pretentious voice, but they stuck with His original lines, which a lot of folks know by heart because they read the Book. And when you're writing lines for God, you better by gum have a vast talent, my friend. This God-Child just sounds like a Hollywood hack scribbled some things down on a napkin.
My own biggest disappointment in this failure involves the dearth of snake-life. Where are the serpents? That's one of my favorite things in the Bible, when Moses turns a staff into a serpent then Pharoah's thaumaturges replicate the "trick". I always thought it said something particular that was never again so particularly addressed, something about the ascension of man's cleverness obscuring the world's numinous nature. Scott just leaves it out. And, in this version, the Nile turns red because crocodiles run mad and kill everything? Well, alright, but isn't the point kind of that God turns it red because He can turn it red? In other words, shouldn't we be addressing questions of Faith?
Walter Chaw has written such a brilliant review of Hail, Caesar! over at Film Freak Central that it may be the last word on its subject, and it's relevant here in that he points to it being a movie about Faith. How is it that the Coen Brothers manage to explore the issue of Faith more compellingly in a tribute to the golden age of Hollywood than anyone else can with an actual Biblical epic? It may have something to do with our current problems with zealotry and terrorism, or there may be another factor at play. Michael Gebert addresses the idea in his Encyclopedia of Movie Awards while speaking of Hammer Films: "There's a nice Ph.D. thesis to be written on the subject of why horror films hint more effectively at the mystery of faith than Hollywood's lumbering Bible soaps... Why Peter Cushing's faith is so much more convincing than Charlton Heston's."
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