Thoughts on: Exodus
Exodus is the perfect example of a 5/10 movie. Nothing was particularly wrong with it, and nothing was particularly amazing about it. The main roadblock Ridley Scott and his writers had to overcome was the basic narrative – it’s literally a movie about a tonne of “God cards” being played. Similar to the plot device of deus ex machina (where a situation is magically saved by an unexpected/unlikely intervention of some kind), Exodus suffers from the main characters being powerless to affect almost anything at all throughout the movie. All the audience and the characters can do is watch as God brings down horrific events onto innocent people, one after the other. There’s no real struggle for the characters to undergo, or for the audience to invest in. This isn’t an unsolvable roadblock though, as Darren Aronofsky showed us with Noah * . The story of Noah is very similar in that it’s mostly about an unstoppable, horrific act of God (though admittedly not as bad as the story of Exod