Gods of Egypt

 

Set in a time before history, Egypt is the centre of the world and Gods and men live in harmony. It is a rich, glorious and prosperous place, it’s such perfect place any God would be honoured to rule over it. So, when Osiris (Bryan Brown) hands power to his son, Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), his other son, Set (Gerard Butler), allows jealously to overcome him and he reacts by killing his father, blinding his brother and taking the kingdom for himself. 

Set enslaves the human population, and amongst these slaves are two lovers, Bek (Brenton Thwaites) and Zaya (Courtney Eaton). Bek has little faith in the gods but his lover, Zaya, is fully devoted to Horus. Zeya believes that Horus is the only one who can defeat Set and thus she gives Bek, the best thief in all of Egypt, the floor plans to Set’s vault where Horus’ eye is kept. However, during the escape Zaya is killed and Bek strikes a deal with Horus to bring her back from the Underworld…he only has to help stop Set from destroying the world further.

Shortly after Gods of Egypt was released and the critics had savagely reviewed the film, Alex Proyas had a bit of a temper tantrum labelling critics ‘vultures’ and ‘less than worthless’. This led critic Mark Kermode to summarise that Proyas is calling his own film a carcass because vultures tend to circle dead or dying things. This pissed Proyas off even more as he retorted that Mark Kermode was a waste of carbon, but it was the critics who were proved right.

Some of the films I negatively reviewed worse than others such as Zoolander 2 and Dirty Grampa weren’t badly made, in fact the editing and direction was reasonably competent. Gods of Egypt, however, is just badly made with sloppy editing and hapless directing. The film’s $140,000,000 budget was probably spent on the GCI which is why it’s a mystery that the film’s GCI is so bad that it’s dated before the year is even out. The action sequences that flick in between GCI shots and live action are disjointed and ugly to look at and the terrible rear projection wouldn’t look out of place in a film from the 50s.

The film’s main selling point is a failure, everything about the way the film looks is fake and soulless, from the swooping camera hurtling through the sparkling, golden cities to the perplexing changing heights of the Gods scene by scene. These Gods are supposed to be taller than humans but Gerard Butler’s Set remains the same height throughout even when he meets his brother, who is always shown to be taller than the humans. It makes no bloody sense. 

The biggest mystery of all though is why the majority of the cast speak with this strange, and rather distracting, English accent. It’s almost as though the actors concentrated so hard nailing the accent that the likes of Brenton Thwaites forgot to be charismatic or funny in the lead role. The poor performances of the cast (Chadwick Boseman…be ashamed…be very ashamed) is perhaps caused by the fact that the actors are laboured with dialogue so bad that nobody past, present, future, real or fiction would ever utter. Most of the cast are so bad that Gerard Butler (the only person speaking with a noticeably different accent for some reason) is best thing about the film. 

God of Egypt is a legitimately awful film, plagued by poor performances, terrible special effects and dreadful dialogue that would not look out of place in Mortal Kombat film.

1/5