heidigard's soup

Essentially a very well-made film, but the writing was severely lacking, (or else the editing made a mess of thing) because this had a number of extremely confusing places where there were jumps in the plot and in time that were almost impossible to grasp. Also – and I shudder to say this – this is one of those movies where the book is better. Not that I’m a fan (I’m actually quite shocked to discover how much I remember form school and surprised at how nerdy I got in my head here…) but come on! They even forwent that epic bit with Moses parting the sea with his staff! And yet they forced in other elements of the plot that seemed to be only there for the heck of it and because they didn’t want to leave anything out so hey! Let’s give this thorn bush a minute to burn in the background of some obscure vision scene with a creepy child stacking cubes just because we can’t have a Moses-film without that… Anyway, I haven’t read the Book in a while but I remember this whole thing differently… wow, and turning Moses into the leader of a genuine terrorist group is NOT a way to gain sympathies. In fact, he does not seem to have any other role than being a splinter cell leader while God does all the work but without taking credit for it, making it seem like random acts of violent mother nature. In the bible, Moses at least was some kind of messenger, an emissary proclaiming the seven plagues (that would have been cool stuff to see) but here, he’s just a weary victim along with all of his people…
On the plus side, they tried to show Moses as a tortured, doubting, human character in a bid for three-dimensionalism, so kudos for that, though he was a picture-perfect copy of Aronofsky’s Noah, which negates the whole thing again in a way.
Anyway, acting-wise this was really good. I love Christian Bale and he did not disappoint. The kid playing God was absolutely fantastic, too! Very serious acting there! Good casting choice!
Visually, this was great, too. Ridley Scott tends to get that part done right. I feel sorry for the horses, though and hope there weren’t any injured animals (or stuntmen for that matter) during the shoot.
Fantastic soundtrack, too.
So, if you don’t know the book it’s probably quite an ok film. Then again, a lot of stuff might not make sense… Also, this is seriously missing the gravitas it deserves and it completely failed to involve me emotionally.
So, despite the length, not a complete waste of time.