So, I’m going to just put this out there: I’m easily amused. Maybe I spent to much time as a recreational pharmaceutical enthusiast in my misspent youth, or maybe my standards are really low, but I find myself enjoying movies and later on learn that everyone hates them. I’m a little more critical on books and music, but movies, I generally just sit back and enjoy ’em.
This is one of those cases.
Gods of Egypt (2016) has a 5.5 rating on IMDB, 15% on RT’s Tomatometer, and just a quick poke around the web shows it’s the dumping ground for all kinds of crap, jokes, you name it. OK, I get it. The cool kids don’t like this movie. Good thing I’m not a cool kid.
It’s nice to see Jaime Lannister with both his hands again.
The plot’s not hard to break down. Set kills Osiris during Horus’ coronation ceremony and takes over Egypt. Horus loses his eyes and goes into exile. Bek, a human thief, loses his wife, Zaya, and puts together a scheme to help Horus regain his throne if he’ll restore Zaya to life.
It’s not so much the plot that you’d watch this for. The special effects aren’t all that good either. There’s a lot of eye-candy, but there are plenty of spots where things just don’t look right. There are a few epic battle scenes that I swear could have come out of a Bollywood movie. Thankfully, there weren’t any musical numbers. When it gets into god-on-god combat, they change into the big animal head form and have at it. Then, the movie feels a bit like a Transformers side-project. It’s a little easier to make out what’s going on, at least.
It’s the world-building that I got a kick out of. In this crazy alternate universe of Egypt, the world is flat, the gods live among humans, and Ra really is up in the sky, fighting off the darkness. The gods are about fifteen feet tall, use gold for blood, and they all transform into the whacky animal-head forms when they need to. I don’t know much about Egyptian mythology, but it sounds legit to me. I liked it as a setting, and wouldn’t mind playing around with something like that. Might make a fun setting for a DnD campaign.
OK, so this thing wasn’t written by Steinbeck. It wasn’t directed by Hitchcock. It’s got better special effects than Clash of the Titans and it doesn’t have a stupid clockwork owl to bring in the R2-D2 crowd, though, and I had a good time with it. So did my son. Who’s nine. So, that either says good things about him or bad things about me.
Probably the latter.
I give it four out of five whacky bird-head guys.