Gods of Egypt

If you still like to watch any episode of TV's Hercules or Xena now and then and enjoy the deliberately simple naivety and bickering of mortals and gods and goddesses who don't go far for a 21st century catchphrase, Gods of Egypt is for you. The film is nothing more than a relaxing fantasy, which fortunately is not take itself seriously. It's a pity that the film is not shorter and a bit more interestingly cast (all the actors are of course dominated by Geoffrey Rush as the god Re, who circles the flat Earth with his ark, dragging the Sun behind him).___P.S. Great music by Marco Beltrami!___P.P.S. I've seen the dubbed version and it's not terrible, except for Gerard Butler, who is voiced by Zdeněk Mahdal. (26/02/2016)

I didn’t have high hopes for this film, but it surprised me by not being as bad as I expected. It was a cross between Prince of Persia and Ancient Egyptian Transformers. Gerard Butler and Kingslayer were excellent, and I even had a few laughs. I wasn't exactly blown away by it, but I was having fun the whole time, so a 3+. (24/08/2016)

Digital Hollywood effects do nothing for me, really. But this tasteless piece of screenwriting offers basically nothing apart from that. I'm actually not surprised that the traditionally bad Gerard Butler is prancing about here. Geoffrey Rush, however, should have spared us his participation in this soulless project. (25%) (12/08/2022)

Whoever was expecting a fiasco after the trailer, got it. A film that is a mess of all sorts of things and yet you remember nothing from it (except maybe Courtney Eaton – and not really because of her acting). The generational refresh in the style of The Mummy is boring, predictable and, above all, incredibly badly made. The beautiful production design, the costumes and the exceptional colour work are completely wasted thanks to the crazy visual effects and the weird work with camera and light. Alex Proyas has always been seen as a visionary director, so it's hard to guess why he made the worst mythological fantasy in years. Gerard Butler was traditionally entertaining, but otherwise a complete waste of time and it doesn't even work as guilty pleasure. Bless The Mummy and Prince of Persia, they are more moderate and clearer films. (19/07/2016)

A thorough lesson in exaggerated ambition and the negative effect of overblown visuals on the nature of the viewer's experience. Few contemporary films have so stirred in me the dilemma of whether Hollywood requires audiences to go to the cinema to see its expensive, highly marketed products because of what they say, or because of how they say it. Gods of Egypt, from a (formerly) A-list director, applies a huge amount of cliché and genre certainty to form the skeleton of its plot, only to be treated without a second thought to visual effects that look inadequate for the budget, unemotional fight or romantic interludes, two famous actors' faces, and a bunch of B-movie slow-motion or sped-up scenes that are rather counterproductive and often uninteresting and irrelevant in relation to the story. What the film can be credited with, however, is certainly its action-oriented audiovisual verve, which throughout its surprisingly short 120 minutes makes it at least a worthy product of unpretentious and mindless cinematic entertainment. Not in the style of last year's Mad Max, which manoeuvred on a far more coherent yet far less hackneyed plot platform, but rather as the formally unbridled masturbation of its creator, who had seen a lot of similar fantasies and tried, for more money and at a faster pace, to create the most modern and honest sibling for them. What would the Wachowskis, for example, have given for something like this in the sci-fi field last year. 60% (05/03/2016)