The Deacon's Bench
From The New York Times:
Ridley Scott’s 3-D “Exodus: Gods and Kings” has computer-generated plagues, waves and tornadoes. It has boat-chomping crocodiles, 400,000 digitally rendered Hebrew slaves and a sword-wielding Christian Bale as a “Gladiator”-like Moses.
But God may still steal the show.
“Exodus,” to be released on Dec. 12, preserves the awful severity of the Old Testament God — one who commands and demands — and does it all within the persona of a willful child. Mr. Scott uses an 11-year-old British actor, Isaac Andrews, to give voice and visage to his Almighty, rather than concealing the deity behind a pillar of fire, too terrible for the eye of man, as Cecil B. DeMille chose to do in his “Ten Commandments.”
And it is Mr. Andrews — stern-eyed, impatient, at times vaguely angelic and at times “Children of the Corn” terrifying — who is already beginning to challenge those who take their Bible seriously.
“It would be difficult for anyone who has any relationship with God and the Scripture to say this is O.K.,” said Chris Stone, a marketing consultant. His company, Faith Driven Consumer, helps to connect products, including movies, with observant Christians. The company was rebuffed, Mr. Stone said by way of disclosure, when it sought to become an adviser to the film, which he has not seen.
…Gary A. Rendsburg, a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, said last week that he could immediately think of only one Old Testament reference that might support the notion of God as a young innocent. That is a very brief reference in the first Book of Kings, Chapter 19, in which God speaks to Elijah in what is described as a “still small voice.”
In the Book of Exodus, Mr. Rendsburg said, God is neither man nor spirit, but rather “a character” who still has manlike traits by which much older generations understood him. “He’s very conversational, and you can still have a one-on-one with him,” said Mr. Rendsburg — though he noted, per Exodus, Chapter 33, that to look upon God would kill a human.
The Hollywood Reporter in mid-November published a report identifying Mr. Andrews as the avatar for God in “Exodus.”
Speaking on Tuesday from Budapest, where he is filming another movie, “The Martian,” Mr. Scott said he trusted his “gut” in deciding to have God speak through what he imagines might be a shepherd boy.
“I want to avoid the clichés,” said Mr. Scott, who added that a voice from the clouds was never an option.
As a footnote: The Hollywood Reporter has just published the first review of the film. Regarding the God-as-boy casting choice:
Although this may offend some devout viewers, it’s actually far more interesting than the booming offscreen voice that DeMille used in his version of the story. This divine child seems angry and vengeful rather than a benign Buddha figure, but one could argue that this is in keeping with the Old Testament God of wrath.
The film hits its peak in the sequence recounting the ten plagues. The savage crocodiles were not in the Old Testament, but as they attack humans as well as fish, they turn the Nile blood red, which is at least an ingenious explanation of how the river might have turned to blood. Frogs, boils, and locusts are truer to the text and are rendered in luscious visual detail.
The climactic chase to the Red Sea is equally spectacular. Although The Ten Commandments won the Oscar for its visual effects, the parting of the Red Sea in DeMille’s film was laughably tacky. Scott comes up with a somewhat more credible portrayal of how the Israelites managed to cross the sea before a monumental storm drowned the Egyptians. This sequence is visually thrilling. The movie should have ended there, but Scott and the writers seem to have felt obliged to include a few of the later parts of the story, including the delivery of the Ten Commandments and a scene of an aged Moses finally arriving near the land of Canaan. But while these events are integral to the Biblical story, they come off here as the worst kind of anticlimax.
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