I attended Gods of Egypt last night, just because I could, and because it looked so bad. And it was. It was so awful, I sat there the entire time wondering “why?” and “how?” This makes no sense! So afterwards I figured it out: the full history and lore that led to the investment of millions of dollars in this movie.
We have to go far back into the misty depths of time to witness the beginnings of Egyptian mythology. We have to go back to 1976.
Scene: A suburban rambler. Mom and Dad are off somewhere, doing stuff, so the Group has the house to themselves for a weekend of weed and the game. The dudes are enthused, they’ve just got their hands on a copy of Gods, Demigods, & Heroes, the latest D&D supplement, and are sitting around the kitchen table.
DM Dude: Dudes! Look what I’ve got! We’ve got to put together a new campaign with all the bitchin’ stuff in this manual!
Dude 1: Awesome!
Dude 2: <in that awkward croak when you’ve just taken a deep toke and are trying to hold it in while talking> Cool. <wheeze>
Dude 3 is on the couch with his girlfriend. Raises hand with his thumb up. He’s busy.
DM Dude: It’s got all the information we need — this is an in-depth survey of all of mythology. We’re going to be learning shit while we play! We can tell our parents we’re doing homework when we’re gaming!
Dude 1: I want cool loot. I want a lance that shoots fire.
DM Dude: We can do that…but it’ll be so awesome that you’ll have to fight a god to get it. Let’s see…first section is about…Egyptian gods! Cool! Let’s do it!
Dude 2: <bong gurgles>
Dude 3: <head pops up from the couch> Hey, can I bring my half-elf thief?
Time passes. Dude 1 gets a degree in marketing. He’s in a planning meeting with his bros.
Dude 1: Guys, we’ve got to get ahead of the curve, we’ve got to come up with the hot new thing that will make us buckets of cash. We need to invest in a movie.
Bro 2: A detective movie? They’re hot now.
Dude 1: Too hot. Everyone is making them now. We need to stand out.
Bro 3: Cowboys?
Dude 1: Played out.
Bro 4: <snorts up a line of coke> I got it. Sword & Sandal epic. So old it’s new again. And we set it in Egypt, ’cause it’s exotic.
Dude 1: Lot of Jews in the movie industry, they aren’t going to like a movie set in a country that isn’t Palestine.
Bro 4: It’s OK, we make sure that not a single cast member looks at all Semitic. Like, what’s their name, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Bro 3: Wait, isn’t Egypt in like, Africa? Will we have to cast black people?
Dude 1: Nah, Egypt is like the non-black part of Africa. We just cast guys with good tans. It’ll work.
Bro 3: Until those PC assholes come after us. There’s got to be one black guy, at least.
Bro 4: And we’ll make him the really smart one! And kind of nerdy! Then they won’t be able to accuse us of being racist!
Dude 1: Yeah, everyone loves an Urkel!
Dude 2 gets a computer science degree. He owns a media company. He’s shooting the breeze with his tech pals in an air-conditioned office overlooking his server farm.
Dude 2: Saw Nebraska last night. It sucked.
Techie 1: I wouldn’t waste time with that crap.
Dude 2: It was just people, acting and shit. None of the magic of movies.
Techie 2: Not even an explosion?
Dude 2: Nope. No special effects anywhere. No CGI at all.
<All the techies look at him in confusion> Why did you go?
Dude 2: I was hoping to meet girls.
Dude 3 gets a…well, nobody knows what he got a degree in, or even if he got one. He’s confident and charismatic though, and he seems to have become some sort of high-powered executive at a board meeting with a bunch of suits. Somehow, he only speaks in bullet points.
Dude 3: Gentlemen, I want you to look at the hottest entertainment properties of this decade.
• Transformers: Michael has done amazing things with this franchise, and it’s bringing in mega millions of dollars.
• 300: Cheap! Cast of thousands, all in a computer. Exotic locations, ditto. And it made millions, and was meme-tastic.
• Game of Thrones: Spectacle! Books! DVD sales! Makes millions.
You know what that says to me?
<Suits look at him expectantly>
Dude 3: • SYNERGY! We take those three things, and we mash them all together, and we’ve got a sure-fire no-fail guaranteed win-win scenario! And I’m going to tie them all together with a pretty bow in a package called something about • EGYPT. • Exotic! • Oriental! • Sexy!
Suit 1: Brilliant!
Suit 2: That just sings “creative”!
Dude 3: Can we get • MICHAEL BAY?
Suit 2: Nope. He’s tied up in some other movie about explosions.
Suit 3: Alex Proyas is available, and he was born in Egypt…
Dude 3: OH MY GOD! • SYNERGY! Lock him in!
Can we get anyone from 300?
Suit 2: Gerard Butler, maybe? He’s got that weird Scottish accent though…
Dude 3: • EXOTIC! He’s a go, grab him. If he can pass for Spartan…and hey, Greece is kinda close to Egypt, right? Sorta dark-complected?
Now what about Game of Thrones? Peter Dinklage available?
Suit 3: Probably not. He’s also very…short.
Dude 3: Yeah, I’ve got this • HEROIC VISION, and he doesn’t fit. Also, I don’t think there were dwarfs in Egypt, were there? • NOT SYNERGISTIC.
What about that other guy, tall handsome white man with the hyphenated name I can never remember?
Suit 1: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau?
Dude 3: • EXOTIC! But comfortably European. HIRE HIM!
Suit 2: We need some actresses…
Dude 3: • WHATEVER. Put out a casting call. Make sure to mention • HOT CLIMATE and • REVEALING CLOTHING.
Dude 3: OH MY GOD. I just had lightning strike my brain. I have these old friends from high school with exactly the talents we need, and one of them was like this history dude who read whole books on Egyptian mythology.
• SYNERGY!
And that is exactly how Gods of Egypt came to be. I know, because I put as much careful research and attention to detail in this history as the creators of the movie put into their work.
I enjoyed your piss-taking, but since I’m never likely to be caught dead watching that movie based on the previews alone, I’m also interested in what they actually did.
Recently I read something about extensive consultation with Egyptologists, and I’ve been curious what that’s all about, because the parts they consulted on can’t possibly have appeared in the trailer.
..So this ISN’T a reboot of Stargate?
Side note: to the extent that modern racial categorization is applicable at all, ancient Egypt is thought to have been a diverse group including African and Semitic peoples. Ramses II was a fair-skinned redhead, apparently. An all-black cast would not have been historically accurate any more than the cast of suntanned lily-whites they ended up using. It would have been a nice change, though.
My boyfriend just saw it the other day, their opinion was that some of the designs for the gods was cool, but it was wasted on literally everything else being sub-par. Also, they wanted to see Ammit in this movie’s style.
@1: I call it credibility laundering. They hire an expert and ignore 95% of what they say. Nolan did the same thing with Kip Thorne.
If you want to know what it was all about, it was a generic fantasy-action-adventure movie where the bad guy wants to end the world with his evil magic, the good guy wants to get revenge and stop him, all with the aid of a happy-go-lucky rogue, and it’s dressed up in Techno-Egyptian garb.
I could tell you the ending, but you can guess what it is if you have any familiarity with the genre at all.
Thanks.
I did get that much from the trailer. And I realize I should just go look it up instead of asking you; hitherto I hadn’t because I had already dismissed it as purest shit, and only heard yesterday someone assert that actual effort had been spent getting [anything to do with Egypt] right.
Since I have at least a passing interest in the subject, I was curious what they had gotten from expert consultants and then actually used–or at least what they claimed to have gotten right. According to this review, though, the answer is absolutely nothing. Apparently Proyas actually denied that the movie was even set in ancient Egypt [Forbes, Dec, 2015].
Hollywood doesn’t give a shit any more, there are so many countries out there trying to buy their way into the film industry that movies like this end up getting nearly half their budget paid for by subsidies.
Australia covered 46% of the budget of this monumental turd through their film incentive scheme, combined with presales, Lionsgate have actually been loudly trumpeting in the press that they’re only going to lose $10m on this $140m piece of crap.
Note: if I sound at all strident, it’s because I respect history–although not a historian myself–to be enraged when I see it ham-fistedly abused. This movie doesn’t even pretend to be historical, so I didn’t care until someone claimed that they had actually tried to get something (I still don’t know what) right.
See also U-571, featuring magic torpedoes that blow naval vessels to smithereens with a single hit–apparently because destroyers are designed to carry massive amounts of high explosives right near the outer hull and below the waterline. Literal fucking smithereens.
[Trudges off to watch Das Boot again, with subtitles instead of the English dub.]
I could tell you the ending, but you can guess what it is if you have any familiarity with the genre at all.
is it “they kill the villain by exploding his doomsday weapon moments before he destroys the world. Possibly someone sacrifices themselves to make that happen. Possibly their sacrifice is immediately undone by some magic bullshit because Aslan Kenobi or something”
#3, A Masked Avenger
I was watching some stuff last night about the tombs in the valley of the kings, which included a good bit of footage of some of the artwork in them. I noticed that the skin tone of the people and gods depicted varied quite widely.
It then struck me as a bit depressing that this should seem surprising to me.
Karpad: did you cheat and watch the movie?
#9: I remember U-571! It was OK, because those were ‘Merican torpedoes, and they had to be that destructive so ‘Merica could WIN THE WAR SINGLEHANDEDLY!
N K Jemisin did a pretty epic rant on twitter. (Two of her books were set in a fantasy version of Egypt; she also brought up the fact that Egypt was a crossroads of trade, so you should have a diverse cast, and not just Hollywood diversity of ‘cast a person of color or two in a supporting role’. My favorite quote: “Whitewashing is a warning. Seeing it means lazy writers, limited worldbuilders, disrespect for the audience’s intelligence.” )
But the consensus seems to be with PZ: the movie is a special effects demo mashed with Generic Fantasy Movie with a superficial Egyptian glaze.
U-571? Wasn’t that the film where they replaced the British and Polish people who actually captured the naval enigma machines with Americans? The one Tony Blair complained about during PMQs?
Thing is, I was neither surprised nor angered by that. Messing up history is what Hollywood does. It’s not too much to say that re-imagining other people’s history as a triumph for America is a key part of your culture.
But, then again, you’re not the only ones. It’s an ancient practice. Vergil turned the Trojan hero Aeneas into a prototypical Roman two thousand years ago. The Alexander Romance and Walter of Chatillon’s Alexandreis made Alexander into a fairytale medieval king (and the same tradition made Nectanebo II his biological father, while wer’e on an Egypt theme). Colin Farrell’s Alexander was no less unrealistic than theirs, but he’s a Hollywood character, and not a product of Medieval literature. Arthur was turned from a post-Roman Celtic mercenary into a late medieval high king of impeccable Englishness. Heck, even Homer’s heroes were what Dark-age Greeks thought the Bronze Age was all about, rather than authentically Mycenaean and Minoan characters. The Queen of Sheba was taken on by Ethiopian Christians as a patron and founder of their royal line, when it seems the real one was a Sabaean from Arabia. And every generation of Christians and Muslims has re-imagined Jesus and Muhammad in its image.
Turning Egyptian mythology into fodder for a sci-fi cartoon film is just part of that long tradition. In millennia to come, I’m sure cultural historians of 21st century America will be learning a lot about American culture and values from studying the way it has transformed these themes.
chrislawson @5:
I certainly didn’t get that impression from this interview with Kip Thorne. Where did you get that idea?
I didn’t. Is that actually the ending, or are we just taking the piss?
Because no matter how genre cliche something might look, I always end up assuming there will be SOME variation.
Well, it’s only fair because I never see the Brits admit that it was actually the Poles who first figured out how to crack Enigma.
From the commercials alone, plus a few critical reviews, it sounds to this addled brain like a cheesy ripoff of Zelazny’s :Creatures of Light and Darkness”. Where Zelaz tried to rewrite Egyptian mythology with a sci-fi bent. This movie seems to have appropriated the sci-fi angle and threw in some magic to “liven it up” (Michael Bay style)
With all the neg reviews it tends to rouse my curiosity; to see if it is so bad I can get my money”s worth, from laughing AT it.
Thanks PZ for taking the bu11!t for us.
PZ @ #13:
No, that was a *German* torpedo, fired from a German submarine at a German destroyer. By a bunch of Yanks, of course.
Actually, apart from the gratuitous explosion, that film would have almost been historically plausible if the closing scene with the PBY was omitted. In the summer of 1942, a German sub gets depth-charged by the Brits but survives. A US sub goes out to investigate, as does another German sub. They all go missing with all hands, along with a German destroyer that was inexplicably cruising around in the open Atlantic. With no messages or bodies recovered, who’s to say what happened?
Come to think of it, did any German WWII-era destroyers use submerged torpedo tubes? That hit on the German destroyer was roughly where torpedo tubes might be, and setting off stored torpedoes could produce catastrophic explosions (though still not quite *that* big, nor would they cause the target to stop dead). That’s how the White Plains (an escort carrier) disabled Chōkai (a heavy cruiser) with a single hit from a 5″ rifle, which is a hell of a lot less powerful than a torpedo.
I dunno, PZ, your first act had absolutely no mention of Mountain Dew or casting of Magic Missile…
@9 &12, exactly. Although, there was the HMS Hood and the Yamato’s during the battle of Samar, with a lucky torpedo hit that cooked off the torpedo launchers and causes significant damage and fires.
With the battle off Samar, one hears in one’s mind’s ear, hooting laughter as the Japanese withdrew, snatching defeat from the gaping jaws of victory. Had the Japanese properly assessed what was before them, it would have been a tragic loss.
Meanwhile, during the time when U-571 actually happened, US torpedoes did one of two things frequently, failed to detonate when striking a target, blowing up in the torpedo tube and very little near the desired behavior. It would have almost have been funny, save that lives were lost.
There’s a humorous list of military corollaries to Murphy’s law that is referred to as Murphy’s laws of combat. One listed, “the diversion that you’re ignoring is actually the main attack”. A more apt description to the battle off Samar and the D-day invasion isn’t possible.
@cartomancer #15:
Tragically U-571 wasn’t a great success, so the production company were never able to afford to make the sequel. It was going to tell the story of how the US Navy evacuated the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches at Dunkirk.
The first line of the Breaking Enigma section of the Bletchley Park website starts thus:
Besides, the history of cryptanalysis of the various Enigma machines, protocols, and ciphers is much more complex than who first made inroads. It was an often extremely collaborative effort, but at other times only certain nations made breakthroughs which were then shared to varying degrees. There were many different versions of the machine (and operating protocols) and different ciphers to encode information of varying significance. Not every method or technology used had longevity or continued relevance.
What is certain is that U-571 is a synthesis of real historical events which deliberately disproportionately credits a different nation in order to appeal to the patriotism of its intended market. The US captured 1 out of 15 U-boats with Enigma material on board. The British captured 13. The U-110 was captured by the British in 1940, whereas U-505 was captured by the US in 1944.
Worst of all, the fate of the historical U-571 (which was never captured) is obscured by that film. The submarine was bombed in 1944, and sank killing all 52 hands.
PZed:
Admit it. You got Louis to guest write that, right?
Does this mean Jeff Dee (of the Non Prophets and formerly of the Atheist Experience) is partially to blame? Pretty sure that’s his art from back when he worked for TSR.
The trailer made it look like crap on the CGI end. Is it better in person?
The really cool thing is that she can totally yell “I already wrote my own!!!!!!” and link to it.
And yes, you should read it if you haven’t already done.
I wonder why “Hollywood” even bothers to pretend to make a movie about something with a historical reference at all. They seem to be missing something that is staring them in the face.
It is the thing I hate the most about “Game Of Throwns” it is not about anything or any place that has ever existed. There is absolutely no flow of history it leads to no where!
It is an ongoing success in spite or because of its a-historicity, magic and dragons aside. Who needs reality? Marvel group? the thousands of “fairy tales ” folk tales and legendary heroes often have little in the way of believability of being real but as stories still work.
Hollywood (the movie business) seems to consistently and repeatedly demonstrate their almost total lack of imagination.
uncle frogy
Yep, film may not have died out just yet, but it’s been limping along for a while, a few scattered birds among JJ Abramsian archaic ungulates. For my money 1999 is the K/T boundary of film in all but name. Let’s look back to that golden age of cinema:
Being John Malkovich
Anna and the King
Magnolia
Toy Story 2
eXistenZ
Girl, Interrupted
The Matrix
Boys Don’t Cry
The Sixth Sense
Cider House Rules
American Beauty
Fight Club (the most anti-MRA movie of all time)
The Talented Mr. Ripley
The Insider
All from 1999, and I’m sure there’s many more I haven’t seen or would have to think about. I can’t make a list that large out of the last ten years, at least without resorting to international titles. Film is dead in the US.
Charlie Jane Anders at IO9 had my favourite review of this film: http://io9.gizmodo.com/murder-is-legal-and-torture-is-mandatory-because-gods-1761496886
I love this! I even learned that “dude” originated in 19th century Germany, and not in ancient Egypt, as I had thought.
#29:
Don’t tell me I have to link the wikipedia article on fiction.
Salt aside, I don’t see why enjoying fictional tales, with full awareness of their fictional nature, is such a problem.
Yep, film may not have died out just yet, but it’s been limping along for a while, a few scattered birds among JJ Abramsian archaic ungulates. For my money 2013 is the K/T boundary of film in all but name. Let’s look back to that golden age of cinema:
12 Years a Slave
Philomena
Gravity
The Wind Rises
The Fifth Estate
Nebraska
Inside Llewellyn Davis
All is Lost
The Book Thief
Frozen
Wolf of Wall Street
American Hustle
All from 2013, and I’m sure I’ve made my point.
taraskan @30 & karpad @34: I think you have to go back much further to find much real gold. Some time before 1960, notable for Carry on Constable, but after 1954, which gave us;
The Caine Mutiny
Dial M for Murder
Executive Suite
On the Waterfront
Rear Window
Seven Samurai
with honourable mention to
Them!
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Belles of St. Trinians
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Doctor in the House
Father Brown
Godzilla
It’s interesting that the Tut miniseries that aired last year on Spike was more diverse in its casting than a big budget Hollywood movie, albeit the lead roles of Tut and Ay being played by actors who are half Indian.
@33
To add on to the “calm down it’s fiction, there’s nothing wrong with that” message, GRRM bases a lot of the characters and events in game of thrones off of real life monarchs and battles.
… and to add a little more, to claim that Martin’s SoIaF has no historicity, you’ve gotta be someone who watches the show but doesn’t read the books. True, it’s a historicity that’s all made up just like the story that’s being told as the narrative present, but that fictional historicity is more significant and solid in context than any I’ve read in a lot of actual history books.
#37:
I’m of two minds about the “just fiction” part, since a lot of fiction can be very problematic. Heinlein, despite good writing skills, was sexist as shit. Lovecraft was incredibly racist. Even though both of them wrote really compelling stories.
@39
I’m not saying that fiction can’t be problematic at all, I’m saying that there’s nothing wrong with a fictional work being purely fictional, rather than referring to real life events.
Vivec,
Agreed. Wholeheartedly. Fiction by itself is neither moral nor immoral, it merely exists.
Indeed. My post at @37 was agreeing with you that @29 is ridiculous.
I do wonder whence the apparent hostility to all things fiction comes. I can see “I don’t like science fiction” or something, but fiction = bad by definition? Peculiar.
“So afterwards I figured it out: the full history and lore that led to the investment of millions of dollars in this movie.”
The attention of the suits in that insipid industry is entirely glued to what they THINK will make money.
What makes anybody think differently? The previews?