Two months ago, I made an extremely brief reference to an upcoming CGI cartoon by the name of The Ten Commandments.
Tonight, I discovered that if you click here, you can see a promo featuring several of the filmmakers, including Christian Slater (who plays Moses), Alfred Molina (who plays the Pharaoh Ramses), Elliott Gould (who plays God) and Ben Kingsley (who played Moses himself in a 1995 TV-movie produced as part of “the Bible Collection“, but merely narrates this newest version).
I haven’t a clue what to expect from this film, though I note that Slater says it will go further than The Prince of Egypt (1998), which pretty much came to an end at the crossing of the Red Sea. It seems the new film will get at least as far as God telling the Hebrews that they must wander in the wilderness for 40 years.
This is at least the third project to bear this name in recent years. Of course, the name is most commonly associated with the films that Cecil B. DeMille directed in 1923 and in 1956. But last year alone, we also saw a TV mini-series and the DVD release of a stage musical starring The Prince of Egypt‘s Val Kilmer.
If the new cartoon sounds like a remake, that may not be entirely accidental; one of its two directors, John Stronach, was also a producer on the animated version of Ben Hur (2003) that featured Charlton Heston‘s voice a few years back. And Heston, of course, played Moses in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.
And speaking of actors, I can’t help recalling that Slater and Kilmer co-starred in Renny Harlin’s Mindhunters (2004; my review).
Anyway, the new film opens in September in “over 600 theatres”. Time will tell if any of those theatres are in Canada.
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