Watch: Gods, monsters and a few human beings come to blows in the first Gods of Egypt trailer

Watch: Gods, monsters and a few human beings come to blows in the first Gods of Egypt trailer November 18, 2015

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I honestly have no idea how closely I’ll be following this film, but: Just for the record, yesterday we finally got a trailer for Gods of Egypt, the big-budgeted mythological action movie that is coming out just a little over three months from now.

You can watch the trailer here:

For some reason this whole thing is reminding me of Chuck Russell’s Bless the Child.

Here’s why:

In the 1990s, Russell was attached to direct a film version of This Present Darkness, a best-selling evangelical Christian novel in which angels and demons do battle for the souls of men and women. (If memory serves, their tactics included such things as throwing invisible, “spiritual” swords at car engines to make them stop.)

Russell, who had already directed films like The Mask and the 1988 remake of The Blob, got as far as developing some visual effects with the wizards at Industrial Light & Magic. But alas, the studio pulled the plug, and the movie was never made.

So Russell went and made Bless the Child instead. And wouldn’t you know it, but the film he did make had some quasi-religious spiritual-warfare elements that were not unlike the sort of thing he might have put into the movie he didn’t make.

So how does this relate to Gods of Egypt?

Well, in this case, the director is Alex Proyas, a guy who is known for making mythic and/or effects-heavy movies of his own, such as Dark City, Knowing and I, Robot. And a few years ago, he was attached to make a spiritual-warfare movie, too.

Specifically, Proyas was going to direct a feature film adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.1 And he got pretty far along in pre-production, casting Bradley Cooper as Lucifer, Benjamin Walker as Michael, Casey Affleck as Gabriel, Rufus Sewell as Sammael, Sam Reid as Raphael, Djimon Hounsou as Abdiel, Callan McAuliffe as Uriel, Dominic Purcell as Jerahmeel, Diego Boneta as Adam and Camilla Belle as Eve — but then the production company halted production just a month before the film was going to start shooting, and then they cancelled the movie altogether.

So what did Proyas go on to direct instead? A movie about gods battling gods — not unlike, perhaps, the angels that would have battled angels in the other film.

What’s more, just as Adam and Eve would have been significant figures in Paradise Lost, it seems that the destiny of the battling deities in Gods of Egypt may be entwined on some level with the destiny of a mortal human couple.

Let’s just hope that this film is better than Bless the Child turned out to be.

In the meantime, the Gods of Egypt Twitter account has posted two new posters, featuring the CGI metallic forms that these gods apparently take:

You can see the earlier posters, featuring six of the movie’s characters, here.

1. Longtime readers of this blog will recall that Paradise Lost was originally going to be directed by Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange) from a script that he wrote with Stuart Hazeldine (The Shack).


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