Holy Moses! Avoid Exodus: Gods and Kings like the plague! Now that I've got the bad jokes out of my system, please feel free to read my review of Ridley Scott's latest. It's up at Screen International.
And as an addendum, I'd like to quote the opening of Roger Ebert's review of Gladiator:
A foolish choice in art direction casts a pall over Ridley Scott's Gladiator that no swordplay can cut through. The film looks muddy, fuzzy and indistinct. Its colors are mud tones at the drab end of the palette, and it seems to have been filmed on grim and overcast days. This darkness and a lack of detail in the long shots helps obscure shabby special effects (the Colosseum in Rome looks like a model from a computer game), and the characters bring no cheer: They're bitter, vengeful, depressed. By the end of this long film, I would have traded any given gladiatorial victory for just one shot of blue skies.Exodus isn't as muddy, per se, but the dependence on CGI is just as evident. That didn't bother me so much in Gladiator because of the performance and storytelling. With Exodus, though, the problem is far more noticeable.
