Gods Of Egypt – Memphis Flyer

I’ll try to be polite about this: 2015 was a banner year for film. 2016 was not. It was a year when bad decisions came back to haunt Hollywood, where cynicism reigned, and where even a total box office gross topping $10 billion won’t stop “the sky is falling” talk. Nevertheless, there were some bright spots. So here’s The Memphis Flyer‘s look back on the year a lot of people would like to forget.

Gods Of Egypt

Worst Picture: (4-way tie) 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, The Angry Birds Movie, Independence Day: Resurgence, Gods of Egypt

The most hotly contested category in our annual film awards was for the bottom spot. Bad movie overachiever Michael Bay’s 13 Hours is an incoherent, slapdash bit of agitprop that turned out to be the first shot in a frighteningly effective anti-Hillary PR campaign. Gods of Egypt looks like a cutscene taken from a particularly boring FPS video game, despite its $140 million budget. The Angry Birds Movie is the video game adaptation no one wanted, and it’s even worse than it sounds. Independence Day: Resurgence is a monument to the hubris of director Roland Emmerich. These “winners” just edged out a pair of DC comics misfires, the turgid Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the laughable Suicide Squad. It was a rich year for poor movies.

10 Cloverfield Lane

Most Claustrophobic: 10 Cloverfield Lane

There was a recurring theme among horror films in 2016: being trapped in an enclosed space with a madman. In Green Room, an unlucky punk band battled neo nazi Patrick Stewart in a secluded skinhead club, while in Don’t Breathe, three thieves get what’s coming to them when the blind homeowner they’re trying to rob turns out to have a basement of murderous secrets. But the best of the bunch was 10 Cloverfield Lane, where John Goodman holds Mary Elizabeth Winstead hostage in a bomb shelter while the world burns around them. Prophetic? Let’s hope not.

Little Men

Overlooked Gems: Maggie’s Plan, Little Men

The rule of thumb for films in 2016 was this: If a movie cost more than $100 million and it’s not made by a Disney affiliate, it’s going to suck. The good stuff was on the low end of the budgetary scale. Maggie’s Plan is a 2015 leftover directed by Rebecca Miller that combined great characterization, fine acting by Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore, and a script where a couple of smart women turned the tables on a clueless man. Little Men is Memphian Ira Sachs’ ode to boyhood friendship wrapped in a warning about late-stage capitalist rent seeking. Seek them out instead of watching Suicide Squad, please.

Arrival

Best Sci-Fi: Arrival

Imagine Independence Day, only instead of a cigar-chomping fighter pilot for a hero, you get the woman whose job it is to try to talk to the aliens. Director Denis Villeneuve took Ted Chiang’s unfilmable story about linguistics and the nature of time and created a quiet masterpiece. It proves Hollywood can be smart, it just usually chooses not to be.

Sausage Party

Best Animation: Sausage Party

While big-budget, live-action Hollywood flailed, the animators flourished. Kubo and the Two Strings, Zootopia, and Moana combined groundbreaking visuals with positive messages. But the best of the bunch was an unlikely R-rated Pixar parody by Seth Rogen that turned Disney positivity on its ear, then did terrible, terrible things to the ear. Terrible things.

The Invaders

Best Memphis Movie: The Invaders

In contrast to the horrors from Hollywood, Memphis filmmakers were on a tear in 2016. Morgan Jon Fox’s long-delayed web series Feral was a big hit for streaming service Dekkoo and will be returning with a second season in 2017. Indie Memphis’ Hometowner category was bigger than ever, with six feature films and enough shorts to fill four programming blocs. The best of the bunch was The Invaders by director Prichard Smith and writer/producer J. B. Horrell. The story of Memphis’ homegrown Black Power movement and the 1968 Sanitation Worker’s Strike that led to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wowed the crowd on opening night of Indie Memphis. Look for it in distribution in 2017.

O.J. Simpson

MVP: O.J. Simpson

From the first moments of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander’s mini series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, I — along with the rest of America — was completely hooked. The crack cast and incisive writing brought the tragic farce to stunning and immediate life. Then came the epic Ezra Edelman documentary O.J.: Made in America, which went even deeper into the former football player’s dizzying heights and murderous final act. The story’s indelible intersection of class, race, sports, sex, celebrity, and violence made these works feel like windows into the roiling American subconscious.

Black Phillip

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Black Phillip, The Witch

The quiet menace of Black Phillip, the devilish goat from Robert Eggers’ Puritan horror The Witch, stood hooves and horns above the pack. The hircine villain was a method actor, randomly attacking people on set with such frequency that the fear Anya Talor-Joy and Ralph Ineson showed on screen was real. Live deliciously, Black Phillip!

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead.

Best Performance: Don Cheadle, Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle’s dream project was a phantasmagorical biography of jazz legend Miles Davis. In addition to writing and directing, he also turned in the year’s best performance by playing Davis as first the brilliant young visionary battling prejudice in the late 1950s, and then the haunted, bitter superstar trying to find his way back to greatness in the 1970s. Not nearly enough people saw Miles Ahead, so be sure to give it a spin.

Miss Sharon Jones

Best Documentary:
Miss Sharon Jones!

There was a moment in Miss Sharon Jones! where director Barbara Kopple follows the terminally ill soul singer as she returns to church for the first time in years. Jones gets up to sing with the worship band, returning to the stage for the first time after a rough bout of chemotherapy, and the pure life force which animated her bubbles explosively to the surface. In one long, ecstatic take, Kopple and Jones created the best movie moment of the year, and one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.

La La Land

Best Picture: (tie) Moonlight,
La La Land

I was torn between these two very different films for Best Picture of 2016 until I realized I didn’t have to choose. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a stunningly photographed, heroically restrained story of a terrified boy growing into a hardened man, and the forbidden love that haunts, and ultimately redeems him. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, on the other hand, bursts at the seams with life and song, resurrecting the classic Hollywood musical with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The two films couldn’t be more different, but they represent the pinnacle of film craftsmanship and provide indelible experiences for the audience.

I still remember the excitement I felt seeing the first trailers for 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Kerry Conran’s film had a visual style derived from the pulp sci-fi of the prewar era, complete with ray guns, rockets that were silver and shaped like rockets, and giant transforming robots that evoked the Fleischer Studios classic animated Superman serial. The special effects were done entirely by CGI — there were almost no sets built, with the actors working in empty rooms against green screens, which promised a cheaper, more flexible way of making images of epic scope. The film’s aesthetic sense was unlike anything else in theaters at the time. Sign me up.

But once I saw the film, it became clear that the filmmakers had put so much energy into perfecting the visual aspects, they neglected to write a script. And while the design sense was near perfect, the technology to seamlessly integrate CGI images and real characters just wasn’t as good as advertised. I was incredibly disappointed.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson, then, when I saw the first trailers for Gods of Egypt. The imagery looks like nothing else in theaters. Better yet, it wasn’t based on either Marvel or DC intellectual properties, but the rich, and to Western eyes, bizarre world of ancient Egyptian mythology. Sure, it was clear this was going to be a big ole cheese plate, but it seemed like the pieces were in place for something different and entertaining.

It must have seemed like that to Australian producer/director Alex Proyas, too, whose directing credits include The Crow, the underrated Dark City, and the massively overrated I, Robot, which came out in 2004, the same year as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Take the Egyptian pantheon — Ra, Horus, Hathor, Osiris, and Set — and their mythic sibling rivalry for the throne of Egypt, reserve plenty of render time for your computer graphics people, and boom, instant blockbuster.

Gerard Butler glowers his way through the film.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the pyramids. Proyas made exactly the same mistake as Kerry Conran: He didn’t hire a writer — or rather, he hired Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who penned my personal worst film of 2014, Dracula Untold. I’ll give the writers this much credit: Gods of Egypt is a step up from their entry in the vampire story sweepstakes. Dracula Untold was a work of gut-wrenching stupidity, whereas Gods of Egypt is just drooling tedium.

The intended hero is Bek (Brendon Thwaites), an acrobatic thief free from the burdens of personality and charisma. We meet him stealing a dress for his lady love Zaya (Courtney Eaton) to wear to the coronation of Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as king of Egypt, and thus, the entire world. Like The Witch, Gods of Egypt is firmly within the point of view of the place and time in which it’s set. This is effective in The Witch, because it evokes terrors made obsolete by the Age of Reason. It doesn’t work in Gods of Egypt because the writers just shoved Egyptian mythology through a Save the Cat screenplay formula and knocked off early for cannabis smoothies. The gods Horus and Set (Gerard Butler) assume winged form and dogfight with magic fire lasers as Apophis the Giant Worm of Chaos literally drinks the Nile River in the background, and yet it’s deathly boring.

Also, this happens.

But it’s not just the screenwriters’ fault — there’s plenty of blame to go around for this debacle. The gods are arrogant and powerful beings who walk among mortals for some mythically obscure reason, but there’s little difference between Coster-Waldau’s portrayal of the alleged hero Horus and Butler’s glowering, testosterone-poisoned Set. With their birthright rule and golden blood, Proyas wrings fascist overtones out of the gods’ struggle for power. Nor will love save us: Horus and Hathor (Élodie Yung) have no visible chemistry — the jerk-god hero’s idea of romance is humiliating the Goddess of Love by repeatedly dunking her in pools of water. The occasional attempts at humor fall completely flat, but in the screening I attended, there were plenty of laughs. This is the kind of film where a major character’s death was met with an audience member loudly exclaiming “You have got to be KIDDING me!”

I wish I were, intrepid filmgoer. I wish I were.