DIrectrospective: GODS OF EGYPT (2016)

Notes on the films of Australian director Alex Proyas.

Horus, God of the Air (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) turns into a bird Iron Man to take Bek (Brenton Thwaites) to see his dad in outer space.

Everybody always wants history to reinforce how they think the world is now, or how it should be, and it’s a great way for historians to show you their bright pink asses. This is how the British Museum and the Louvre and the Met and the other big boy museums of the West came to show off all their looted Greek and Roman antiquities as exemplary works of aesthetic purity, carved as they were from Enlightment-white marble, when it turns out that all the garish paint just got worn off. These assholes thought that the fucked-up statue was supposed to look like that because it would mean that the art of the people they claimed to have inherited culture from (I mean I guess the Romans did murder their way across France and Britain) was more refined than the art of the people they were actively colonizing, whose cultures they refused to admit made theirs look boring as hell. And these are the guys who invented suggesting that someone doth protest too much!

Now “did you know that all the Greek statues were actually painted like fiberglass Ronalds McDonald” is beyond tired, amateur schoolyard Well Actually shit. The new shit is “people who think aliens built the pyramids are racist because they find it easier to believe that space aliens, a thing we aren’t sure is even real and that almost certainly doesn’t resemble anything we could even imagine, did it than Africans.” That’s the very hot spicy shit. And it’s correct, they are racist for thinking that. I tried digging into the long, stupid history of Europeans trying to figure out a way to prove that those real smart Ancient Egypt guys were more like them than like the people upon whose brutal subjugation they built an entire world economy and my eyes started to cross, but I think I got the general idea. First, the French were very excited about all the cool stuff Napoleon stole from Egypt and wanted to say that the people who made the cool stuff were basically French out of vanity. The racial-phenotypal identity of ancient Egyptians became a real point of contention in the debate over slavery in the United States, because if the people who carved the Sphinx had dark skin it would really throw a wrench into their argument that the enslavement of Africans was justified by those Africans’ intellectual inferiority to Europeans. In a satisfying, if potentially ahistorical, reversal of the 17th century French bullshit, a number of Black and Black African Egyptologists have argued that today we would recognize the ancient Egyptians as Black and wouldn’t it just be convenient if the one thing to come out of Africa that has earned Europeans’ respect came from the least Black part of Africa the Europeans could find. The scholarly consensus now seems to be that the phenotypal makeup of ancient Egyptians was probably all over the place due to migration and trade, and over the course of thousands of years the population was sometimes more and sometimes less Black.

GODS OF EGYPT, Alex Proyas’s seventh and, as of this writing, most recent film, is a bugnuts gold-plated sword-and-sandal CGI freakout that gives the SIN CITY right-off-the-page adaptation treatment to Egyptian art with all its weird proportions and animal-headed humanoids. It has two Black people in it, only one of whom has any characterization at all. There are no actors of Egyptian heritage in the film.

To be fair, a third Black actor did the motion capture for the CGI Sphinx, but you wouldn’t know that unless you watched the special features on the Blu-ray because in the movie he is made of sand. They also let some Black people stand around in the background of some scenes, and I suppose some Egyptians might be in there too but it’s hard to say. I’m getting ahead of myself.

The film takes place not in the Egypt of old, but in the Egypt of ancient myth. The gods live among their human subjects in a verdant paradise with mountains and valleys and waterfalls, all surrounded by harsh desert, and partway through the film we get to see that the whole thing is mounted on an enormous flat disc in space, DARK CITY-style, which the Flat Earth people must have loved seeing if any of them saw this. It doesn’t look like there’s a ton of other places to go in this world - you can’t get to, like, Greece, I don’t think. Those gods are all played by white TV actors and handsome Australians whose names you can’t remember and Gerard Butler and then also Chadwick Boseman plays the effete God of Wisdom, Thoth, in a performance that is, let’s say, unkind. The Gods of Egypt have magic powers and gold for blood and some of them can turn into animal-headed Iron Mans for fighting. They’re also about nine feet tall, a hilarious effect that was achieved by some complicated forced perspective and motion-controlled photography but definitely looks like for shots with gods and people together they cut the gods out in Photoshop and then dragged the corner of the little selection box to make them bigger. It’s so stupid and it rules. This movie is not great, and it has plenty of problems not least of which is the egregious whitewashing of the cast, but it’s also totally insane that a work of such specific unbridled weirdness got made, and for $140 MILLION DOLLARS. Gerard Butler’s evil God of the Desert, Set, has a flying chariot pulled by two giant flying scarab beetles. Geoffrey Rush plays Ra, God of the Sun, as a bald old man with gold-flecked liver spots who can go from regular nine-foot god height to towering thirty-foot flaméd titan who shoots laser beams out of his spear at his eternal enemy, the night beast Apophis, who looks like a hurricane with shark teeth. Come on! Come on.

This is a movie for people who found the first THOR to be too restrained. If the cast better reflected the people of Egypt, ancient or contemporary, I’d be screaming for a critical and public reappraisal of this wacky movie. As it is, it’s a truly guilty pleasure.

Alex Proyas is Egyptian, technically. He was born in Alexandria, to an Egyptiote (ethnically Greek Egyptian) father and a Greek Cypriot mother. His father’s family had deep roots in Egypt, although he and Proyas’s mother moved with their son to Sydney, Australia when he was three years old, and he has lived there and in the United States ever since. He doesn’t look any more “Egyptian” than Gerard Butler. While both he and Lionsgate issued very rare apologies for not, y’know, casting anyone from Egypt in their Egypt movie, he still likes to point out that the film isn’t set in Egypt. He’s not wrong - Egypt is not a discworld floating in space. These nine-foot gods were not real, and thus Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor with the intimidating jawline from Game of Thrones, looks as much like his character, Horus, God of the Air, as anyone else does. Everybody looks equally like a thing that doesn’t exist, is what I’m saying. I am pretty sure this is true. But real people came up with this mythology, and it was a real part of their real lives, and they probably didn’t see very many Danish people so they probably envisioned the gods as looking more like themselves than like the Game of Thrones jawline man. They, or at least anyone who feels a kinship with them all these centuries later, deserve to see themselves reflected in this big expensive tentpole movie that couldn’t exist without them.

What’s truly weird is that the cast isn’t entirely lily-white. Horus’s love interest, Hathor, the Goddess of (fittingly) Love, is played by Elodie Yung, whose mother is French and father is Cambodian. The human thief with whom Horus must team up to save Egypt, Bek (extraordinarily Anglo boy Brenton Thwaites), is along for the ride in the hopes that Horus will save from the underworld his murdered love, Zaya, who is played by MAD MAX: FURY ROAD’s Courtney Eaton, an Australian actress of mixed English, Chinese, Māori, and Cook Island Māori descent. So Proyas is perfectly comfortable casting pretty, light-skinned ethnically ambiguous actors whose ancestors lived even further away from Egypt than Denmark or Scotland.

Maybe he took all the wrong lessons from the racist ballyhoo about Idris Elba’s casting as the Norse god Heimdall in Marvel’s THOR movies. A few whiny racist nerds online got upset about the casting of a Black British actor as a Norse god because he doesn’t look like the very Nordic Heimdall of the comics and the mythology on which they are based, to which the filmmakers and people with sense replied that the Norse gods aren’t real, this conception of them is of space aliens who happened to visit Scandinavia, where they were worshiped as gods, and that Elba is great and cool and handsome and it’s nice to see him in a movie, especially one that traffics in imagery of which white supremacists are fond. GODS OF EGYPT employs similar logic, only it leaves out the bit where racism exists. Elba would make a fantastic Set, by the way. He’s a great villain. More on that in a second.

This movie kerplunked a little bit at the box office, earning $150 million on a $140 million budget which somehow despite enormous tax credits from the Australian government ended up losing a reported $90 million. They got some real neat calculators over there at Lionsgate! I don’t imagine most moviegoers were very aware of the casting controversy that flared up when the first marketing images were released, although that certainly lent the film a bad smell online. More likely to my mind is that they saw the film for what it appeared to be: another cynical attempt to turn public domain material into big-budget tentpoles and maybe even a whole cinematic universe, which didn’t work for I, FRANKENSTEIN or DRACULA UNTOLD or THE LEGEND OF HERCULES or VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN, either. That or a very late effort to grab the tail end of 300 fever. I forgive them for their wrongheadedness. This film is neither cynical nor derivative; its structure and tone are commercial enough, but so much about it is so singular and bizarre that it’s hard to deny the movie feels like something someone wanted to see, not just something someone wanted other people to pay to see. Imagine if it had people of African descent in it.

That BLACK PANTHER made the staggering amount of money that it did isn’t because it was set in Africa with an overwhelmingly Black cast. It’s because it was a very good film, with strong performances and well-directed action and a script that actually grapples with race and post-colonialism in a way that movies never do. It did, however, get a lot of free positive publicity for starting to undo the century of poor and negative representation of Black and African people on film. Just as Black audiences deserve to feel represented by a great, uncommonly thoughtful superhero movie with a cast full of heavy hitters, I think Black and Egyptian audiences deserve to feel represented by a big dumb stupid movie about ancient Egyptian Iron Man gods punching each other in the sky too. That gives this movie a more obvious reason to exist, beyond Proyas’s desire to see it himself. The excuse is used less now, but Hollywood has historically argued that there aren’t more films with black leads directed at a general audience because there aren’t enough black movie stars with sufficient box office appeal. I’m far from the first person to say this, but when the producers of GODS OF EGYPT tried that old chestnut, they must have forgotten they were promoting a movie starring a guy named “Brenton Thwaites.” There are plenty of people who look more like ancient Egyptians did who are no less famous than, like, Emma Booth.

Give me Idris Elba as Set. Give me Laurence Fishburne as Ra. Give me Sophie Okonedo as Nephthys. Proyas’s THE CROW buddy Ernie Hudson as Horus’s murdered father Osiris. Literally anyone more African than Courtney Eaton as Zaya (might give that role a little more heft while you’re at it). Give me Rami Malek, who is Egyptian, as Bek - I’m not crazy about him, but he’s certainly no less charismatic than Thwaites. Or you could gender-swap the Bek and Zaya roles and have Zendaya teaming up with a god to save her defenseless boyfriend J. Quinton Johnson, who never popped after EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! like he should have. Mena Massoud from ALADDIN is no less hot than Coster-Waldau and was in 2016 considerably less 45 years old. Hollywood loves to give those whose-side-is-she-on threatening sex object roles like Hathor to Rosario Dawson and Zoës Saldana and Kravitz, but they could also have gotten in on the Jodie Turner-Smith game early or thrown another well-deserved paycheck at Naomi Harris. Or give a bunch of talented unknowns a crack at the big time, since you’re going to have to sell this on the effects anyway. Then you’ve got some fun popcorn junk with actual goodwill behind it that people can put as a break between rewatches of BLACK PANTHER. This is easy stuff. I’m printing you money, Lionsgate. Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?

The plot’s got plenty of the icky philosopher king nonsense that Proyas loves - we’re supposed to root for the mopey rightful king to get his act together and reclaim his throne, which, like, what if I’m actually not a big king guy at all - but that’s par for the course for these sci-fi fantasy epics. American audiences have some weird father stuff going on. But it’s a welcome return to the all-out weirdness of THE CROW and DARK CITY, if softened somewhat by the CGI sheen and the very un-goth color scheme, and as good a place to end our Directrospective on Alex Proyas as any. Certainly better than YESTERDAY or ABDUCTION, and there’s far more of the filmmaker in here. I’m looking forward to whatever his next project is - if the current pattern holds, it should be out around 2025 - and I’ll be back soon with a series on the extremely similar director Terence Davies. Honestly might not be worth doing that one right after Proyas, they’re so eerily alike. Look out for that!