There are films destroyed by critics that sweep the box office, there are also those praised by the specialized press that are later ignored by the public and in other cases both fronts coincide. That’s wonderful when it’s for the better, but things change diametrically when it’s for the worse. That was exactly what happened with ‘Gods of Egypt’, a tape of epic fantasy which has just landed on Amazon Prime Video.
What a disaster
Behind ‘Gods of Egypt’ is Alex Proyasa director many remember for ‘Dark City’, but the truth is that his filmography also includes titles such as ‘El Cuervo’, ‘I robot’ or the undervalued ‘Signs of the future’. Of course, such was the crash of ‘Gods of Egypt’ -it is estimated that it caused some losses of 90 million dollars– who has not directed any film since then.
It was useless to have a cast that mixed faces known as Gerard Butler and Geoffrey Rush with rising actors at that time like Nicolaj Coster-Waldau and Chadwick Bosemansince everything here tends to a misunderstood excess that leads to what should be an impressive adventure ending up being an absurd spectacle.
The first problem is that visually it is bewildering and cumbersome, offering such ridiculous moments that it is difficult to get fully into what he proposes. I’ve deliberately avoided any mention of taking it seriously, because just when it comes closest to being a functional hobby is when it comes across as self-conscious about how silly it is.
Unfortunately, it is not something that has the necessary continuity and what is left is a waste of money in which those involved never seem to want to row in the same direction. And besides, it is one thing to understand that the fantasy proposed here has very little to do with the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, but it takes more than that to justify such nonsense.
It didn’t exactly help that Proyas himself took such offense that he didn’t hesitate to say that all professional critics are “disturbed idiots“, but in the end that did not stop being a visceral reaction to the collapse of ‘Gods of Egypt’Well, before that happened, there was even talk of a possible sequel that, obviously, we will never see.
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