Gods of Egypt (2016) Review
4/10
Egypt in this film is a flat world with a sun barge circling it, gods who stand nine feet tall and bleed gold, and an underworld with an actual toll gate. The production designed all of that seriously and at expense.
The 4 is for what is genuinely here. Several sequences are spectacular. Butler is good, as he reliably is, playing Set as a warlord who has been passed over and knows it. Around him is a film with no idea what register it is in.
The gap between the ambition and the result is the whole story of this picture. It had the money, the designers, a director with real credits, and a mythology nobody had properly used. It arrived mediocre, which is a worse outcome than arriving bad.
The Design Department Turned Up
Whatever else went wrong, somebody thought hard about what this world looks like. The gods are physically larger than mortals in every shared frame, which is a simple decision maintained across a whole feature at considerable cost.
They also bleed gold, transform into armored animal forms, and are diminished physically when they lose power. The flat earth with a sun barge above it is a genuine attempt at rendering the cosmology instead of a generic fantasy sky.
Peter Menzies Jr. shot it, Marco Beltrami scored it, and the Australian production put the money on screen. The Australian government provided a tax credit covering close to half the budget, and Lionsgate’s own exposure was under ten million dollars once presales were counted.
So the film is not a case of money wasted invisibly. You can see every dollar. The failure is upstream of the spending.
Proyas is also not a hack. He made The Crow and Dark City, both of which built worlds on far less money and made those worlds matter to the plot. Whatever happened here, it was not a director who lacks the instinct for this.
Worldbuilding at this scale only pays if the story requires the world. Here the scale is decorative, because the plot underneath it is a plain quest that would work identically in a smaller and cheaper setting.
Test your invented rules against your plot. If a god bleeding gold or standing nine feet tall never changes what a character can do or decide, it is production design, not worldbuilding.
The version of this film that works has the cosmology as an obstacle. A flat world with a measurable edge, an underworld with a toll, a sun barge on a fixed schedule. Every one of those is a constraint the story declines to use.
Butler Is Playing the Right Film
Set has a grievance and Butler plays it straight. He is the brother who did the work, got the desert, and watched the throne go elsewhere, and the performance carries an ordinary human resentment inside an enormous costume.
That is the correct instinct for this material. Gods in myth are not dignified. They are petty, vain, territorial and enormous, and Butler is the only member of the cast pitching his performance to that idea.
He also brings physical conviction. Butler has spent a career being the most committed person in films of variable quality, and he does it again here, treating a nine foot god of chaos with the seriousness the design deserved.
The problem is that nobody is meeting him. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays Horus with a light irony, Brenton Thwaites plays Bek as a modern wisecracking thief, and Geoffrey Rush appears to be in a different film altogether. Four registers, no agreement.
Tonal disagreement is a directing failure before it is an acting one. Somebody has to decide whether this world is funny, and everybody has to be told. Watch any two-hander here and you can see two performers guessing differently about what the scene is.
The Casting Decision and Its Cost
A film about Egyptian gods was cast with a Scot as Set, a Dane as Horus and an Australian as the mortal lead. Chadwick Boseman and Elodie Yung are in it and are not the leads.
When Lionsgate began promoting the film in November 2015, the backlash was immediate, and both the studio and Alex Proyas issued apologies before release. Boseman told GQ that he had anticipated the criticism when he first read the script.
This is the reason the film sits on a list about message overriding common sense, and the point cuts both ways. The casting was a commercial calculation about international presales, and the calculation was wrong on its own terms. The film opened to around fourteen million dollars domestically.
Proyas responded to the reviews by attacking critics publicly in terms that were considerably more damaging to him than the reviews were. A director who has made The Crow and Dark City had reputation to spend, and he spent it.
A decision made for commercial reasons still has to survive the audience noticing it. The presale logic here assumed viewers would not care, and the assumption was tested and failed in the same quarter.
The narrower craft point is about specificity. Setting a story in a real culture and then declining to engage with it produces a generic result, which is what happened here. The film is set in Egypt and could be set anywhere.
When the criticism lands, the worst available response is to argue with the audience. Whatever the merits, it converts a bad opening weekend into a permanent association, which is what happened to this film and its director.
The Script Nobody Fought About
Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless wrote it, and the structure is a mortal thief teaming with a diminished god on a quest to recover an eye, defeat the usurper and rescue a woman who dies early to motivate him.
Every beat of that is a beat you have seen. The mortal is plucky, the god is arrogant and learns humility, the villain wants everything and gets a monologue about it. None of it is incompetent and none of it is doing anything the design was set up to support.
The dead girlfriend is the clearest symptom. Zaya exists to be lost so Bek has a reason to move, and the film has an entire underworld with a working economy where she could have been a character with her own agency. It puts her in a queue instead.
That is what mediocre means in practice. Nothing is broken. Everything is the version of itself that requires no argument, and the result is two hours that cannot be recalled the following week.
Egyptian myth was available and unused. The weighing of the heart, the forty-two judges, the fear of a second death, the idea that a name spoken aloud keeps a person alive. Any one of those is stranger and more usable than the plot this film chose, and all of them were free.
What the Numbers Say
The film cost a hundred and forty million dollars, opened to about fourteen million in the United States, finished with thirty-one million domestically and roughly a hundred and fifty worldwide.
The Hollywood Reporter put the loss to Lionsgate at close to ninety million. The company had claimed exposure under ten million because of presales and the Australian tax credit, and both things can be true depending on which set of books you read.
It picked up five Razzie nominations and a fourteen percent critics score, with an audience score more than twice that. That split is the honest measure. People who chose to watch a flat-earth Egyptian fantasy got roughly what they came for.
Which is where I land. This is not one of the great disasters. It is an expensive film that came out fine, and fine was the one outcome nobody involved could afford. Ten years on it has broken even, which is the quietest possible ending to the story.
Mediocre is commercially worse than bad. A disaster gets talked about, and a film that is merely acceptable generates nothing at all, which is why it disappears without recouping.
For a writer the equivalent is the competent manuscript. Nothing to fix, nothing to quote, no reason for anybody to press it on a friend. That book fails more quietly and more completely than the flawed one with something in it.
The way out is to make at least one element indefensible in its ambition. Butler’s performance is the only thing here operating at that level, and it is the only thing anybody remembers.
Should you watch Gods of Egypt?
If you want to see a serious attempt at rendering a flat earth with a sun barge, and Gerard Butler committing entirely to a god of chaos with a promotion grievance, then yes. Expect the story around him to give you nothing to hold onto.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists