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When Blockbusters Go Bad

Throughout the course of cinematic history there have been countless examples of movies that have flopped despite having large sums of cash thrown at them and despite having the talents of some of Hollywoods biggest and brightest actors and directors involved in the production.

Take these films for example -

Jupiter Ascending - Directed by the Wachowski sisters (brothers) and starring Channing Tatum, MIla Kunis and Eddie Redmayne. It cost $176 million to make and took only $183 million at the global boxoffice.

Green Lantern - Directed by Martin Campbell and starring Ryan Reynolds. Its budget was a whopping $200 million but at the boxoffice it pulled in only $219.

Jack the Giant Slayer - Directed by Bryan Singer of all people and starring the likes of Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci and Ian McShane. The film took $197 million against a budget of $195 million.

So you see it doesn't matter how good your intentions are or what talent you have onboard for your project. If your movie gets bad word of mouth or fails to connect with audiences then the chances are your blockbuster movie is actually going to end up as a flop.

All of which brings us to the topic of this review which is The Gods of Egypt, a movie based loosely around the Egyptian mythology of Horus, Set and co. It cost the studio $140 million to make and brought in just $150 million at the global boxoffice. This was despite it featuring the likes of Gerard Butler and Geoffrey Rush and being directed by Alex Proyas who is responsible for one of my favourite films of all time The Crow.

The film begins with a bit of exposition to explain that gods live among humans but that you can tell us apart as they are alot taller than us, bleed gold blood and can transform into a variety of beasties. We also get a bit of back story regarding the brother gods Osiris and Set who are given different parts of the kingdom to rule over.

This brings us to the coronation of Osiris' son Horus who is to take over ruling the kingdom from his father. This does not sit well with his uncle Set who shows up and kills Osiris before stealing Horus' eyes (the source of his power), banishing him and molding the kingdom in his own dark image. Part of this process sees him killing off all the gods except for those who have gone to ground and live in fear for their lives.

Cue Bek, a human who aint got time for all this nonsense and who along with his love Zaya steal back one of Horus' eyes and head out to give it back to the god in the hope that he will return and kick Sets ass. Along the way however Zaya is killed and so Bek agrees to tag along with Horus under the premise that Horus will bring Zaya back to life once its all been said and done.

So their adventure begins as they quest to stop Set who in turn sends his minions after Horus to stop him in his tracks and rid the workld of his troublesome nephew once and for all.

It all culimates of course in a final battle that sees Horus kill his uncle and Zaya come back from the dead despite we viewers being told that this is impossible throughout the film.

So what exactly went wrong with Gods of Egypt? Well to begin with the effects are terrible, the scale of gods to humans is constantly changing and doesn't seem to be the same in any two consecutive scenes. Then there are the transformations which are incredibly ropey. How bad are they? Well think back to Terminator 2 which was released 26 years ago. Thats almost 2 decades that have gone by, during which time effects and technology have improved greatly yet if the look of the effects in Gods is anything to go by you would think that this movie was released before T2, and no that is not an exaggeration its a stone cold fact.

The acting is also quite bad in Gods but then having seen the most recent output by Gerard Butler this is maybe not such a big surprise. Butler aside though there is not one single redeeming performance in the entire film although the actors are not helped by the clunky dialogue they are given to work with.

Now I mentioned earlier in this review that Alex Proyas was behind one of my favourite films of all time and he has also helmed Dark City although both of these were in the 1990's. In the 21st century he has been responsible for I Robot (which is OK) and most recently Knowing and of course Gods of Egypt so maybe the fact that this film is such a mess shouldn't come as a huge surprise. It's also a shame that Gods is so bad because both his parens are of Egyptian descent so I'm sure that motivated him to want this project to work, it's just unfortunate that it all fel flat on its backside in such spectacular fashion.

All of which leads me the score that I believe Gods of Egypt is worth. As per usual its out of 10 and this go around I feel that the movie in question deserves a 3. My reasoning for this is that I had no expectations going into viewing it and whilst it is a terrible terrible film it at lease did not carry the weight of expectation like other blockbusters such as Dawn of Justice and Ghostbusters, therefore in my mind it is not as bad as either of those two movies.


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