It's stocked mainly with super-fit actors, few of whom are likely in the ballpark of what actual ancient Egyptians looked like, unless Egypt was populated mainly by white folks with gym-sculpted bods. Proyas sort-of-apologized last year for the casting, saying he would've hired more actors of color if it hadn't made the movie so hard to finance at the budget level he needed. As is, the most prominent nonwhite actor is Chadwick Boseman as a faintly bitchy incarnation of Thoth, the father of science, religion, philosophy and magic. Nevertheless, it's a good cast. Nobody's phoning it in. They're all present and laying it on with a trowel, including Rufus Sewell (star of "Dark City") as the architect Urshu—who has the snitty defiance of a young Tony Curtis—and Geoffrey Rush as Set and Horus' grandfather, the sun god Ra, who lives on an orbital platform in space, and spends eternity using his sun-bolt lance to zap a giant black leviathan-worm that wants to eat its way through the planet. (No point using this movie to cheat on your mythology final, kids.) Most of the lines in Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless' screenplay are delivered straight, without winks, even if they're clearly meant to provoke applause or knowing laughter. (Perusing the skyscraper-sized tower Set ordered Urshu to build for him, he asks, "Could you make it any taller?")
"Gods of Egypt" has a vision, cockeyed though it may be. There are airborne chariots drawn by winged beetles and flocks of birds, an Indiana Jones-style treasure trove rigged with booby-traps, and a bracelet that repels 42 different demons. When gods are cut, they bleed gold. After Urshu walks in on Set during a post-coital moment, the newly-crowned king of Egypt rolls out of bed and dons a smoking jacket covered in multicolored metal beads; it looks like something Prince would wear to a bar mitzvah.
It's a shame that "Gods of Egypt" is unable to resolve key conflicts except by having characters fight on top of pyramids and mountaintops while the camera whirls around them, or run away from theoretically enormous yet oddly weightless monsters and falling objects, just like every other big budget action film clogging up multiplexes. Things fly this way, things fall that way; people leap through the air on wires and yell "Aaaauuuugggggh!"; Dolby digital sound effects go boom and creeeeaaaaak and boooosh and the editing goes cut-cut-cut-cut to hide that few of the images are composed strikingly enough to linger on. The movie could have been a work in the mode of "Barbarella" or "Flash Gordon" or "The Sword and the Sorcerer"—larks that were cobbled together from scraps of their decade's cinematic and design and fashion cliches, yet formed into works of true personality, films that were simultaneously self-aware and innocent. But the repetitious, unimaginative action kills the charm.
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