Exodus: Gods and Kings

Director Ridley Scott—abetted by writers Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian—covers ground already harvested twice by Cecil B. DeMille in The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956), with Moses (a grumbling Christian Bale) and Pharaoh (a sniveling Joel Edgerton) squabbling over the fate of Egypt's Hebrew slaves. Where DeMille put the story in terms of divine deliverance from totalitarianism, Scott and company give it a more agnostic cast, couching it all as one huge sibling rivalry. God is presented as a rather smugly precocious little boy (Isaac Andrews), the ten plagues come off as a series of incredibly unlucky coincidences, and Moses never even parts the Red Sea. DeMille's Ten Commandments was corny but never dull; Scott's version is 90 minutes shorter but feels 30 minutes longer.