This movie is awful. The acting is dull, the story is predictable and the action is boring. “Gods of Egypt” is directed by Alex Proyas, and is a loose adaptation of the Egypt mythology story of Horus and Set. At his coronation, Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), god of air, is attacked and blinded by his evil uncle Set (Gerard Butler). Set declares himself pharaoh, along withenslaveing all humans. In order to get his eyes and throne back, Horus must team up with the mortal thief, Bek (Brenton Thwaites) for these reasons. They are joined by Horus’ grandfather, Ra (Geoffrey Rush), in addition to his ex-girlfriend Hather (Elodie Yung). One can’t even laugh at how bad the movie is because it manages to make boringfun. The movie is too bland to be considered so awful it’s good.
For a movie taking place in an African country, the castis seeminglyallwhite. There are a few black extras in some crowd shots, but there are only two black actors that have speaking roles, only one of which has a name. Also, everyone is British because Hollywood thinks all pre-20thcentury non-American countries talk like they were in a Shakespeare play.
The acting isn’t completely awful, but the script gives the actors nothing to work with. The script only gives them one liners, cliched ones at that.
These are some of the worst special effects that have been in a movie in a long while. The CGI (computer-generated imagery) appears as if it’s in wildly different places of development. It doesn’t look finished in a quarter of the shots, like something out of a Playstation 1 video game. The use of the green screen is obvious. The background looks flat. The gods are supposed to be giant compared to the mortals. The effect they use to achieve this is so distracting and awkward-looking. The filmmakers must have realized the same thing because gods and mortals are barely in the same shot even though half the movie is about a mortal and a god traveling together.
Instead of having the gods be part animal, the film gives them this weird full-body armor with animal helmets that appear out of nowhere. It looks fake and it’s not clear what animal it’s supposed to be.
The lazy fight choreography, in addition tobad camera work doesn’t help either. The action consists of mostly rolls, but a few times Proyas tries to do the matrix thing where everything on screen freezes and the camera rotates around the freezed action. Combined with the above mentioned effects it creates some truly terrible, terrible scenes.
The most surprising thing is how boring this whole movie is. It’s blander that untoasted white bread served with a glass of tap water. There is a scene in this movie where half-naked women ride giant snakes that breathe fire; “dull” should be the last word that describes a scene like this, but it does.
“Gods of Egypt” wants to call back to classical mythology movies such as “Jason and the Argonauts” and “Clash of the Titans.” Unfortunately the movie fails on nearly every level to entertain.