The Christian Bale performance guided by Monty Python: “You have to get it out of your system”
The swords & sandals genre is dead, and the new historical epic struggles to be born. Exodus: Gods and Kings did little, if anything, to pump some blood into the genre’s sand-encrusted veins. If you had two and a half hours to kill in 2014, you might have seen it. Probably not, though. The theatres were a ghost town upon its release.
The critics who saw Ridley Scott’s attempt to recapture the Gladiator magic didn’t like it, and the movie was forgotten in the untended backyard of cinema. It had a good cast, though, including Christian Bale as Moses. Interestingly, in an interview with Screen Rant, Christian Bale said that he was inspired by comedy to cope with the film’s “heavy” themes.
“The very first film I rented immediately after meeting with Ridley, and while I was still trying to get my head wrapped around it, thinking whether it was something that could be possible, I went and rented The Life of Brian, which is a favourite film of mine, a beautifully made film,” Bale revealed. “The point being that not only do I enjoy that film, but anything, where you are approaching it from a very earnest point of view, can have the potential to become The Life of Brian very quickly, so it was sort of the guiding light throughout, and I must confess, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ was kind of always humming through my head.”
Adding, “And then after that, I rented Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part 1. You have to get it out of your system. You have to have humour with something that is as earnest as this and as heavy as this; you have to add an element of comedy during your everyday life during filming because otherwise, it becomes too exhausting.”
Exodus was unpopular with audiences and critics, holding a terrible critical consensus and poor word of mouth from anyone you know with a mouth. It just didn’t click with people. And complaints of inaccuracies, boring writing, bad CGI and meandering pacing as though walking into an ocean that wasn’t split killed the film in popular memory. There was also the issue of ‘whitewashing’ as Christian Bale isn’t Jewish. Nor Egyptian. You don’t need to look it up to know that.
Of course, The Life of Brian features nary a person of colour (in fact, Exodus has more in credited roles), but voices political, moral and otherwise are less tolerant of this today. The ‘you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today’ argument got tired in less time than it took to write that sentence. Raunchy comedies are as prevalent and popular as ever. And like Christian Bale, sometimes we need them to get through the day.
Hollywood keeps letting Ridley Scott make pseudo-historical epics (and even including ‘historical’ in that sentence is generous), and his dislike of using proper scripts is well documented, which has served him well and emboldened his creativity in the past. But not lately. We might not get another Alien, Blade Runner or Gladiator out of him, but we’ll probably get another Exodus: Gods and Kings.
