I recently watched the entirety of Gods of Egypt with Cam on a bit of a whim.  I say I watched it in its entirety because I caught the middle of it one night when I was in Washington DC about a year ago, and I was intrigued enough to pick it up when I saw it on DVD.  What I was expecting when I picked it up was a total cheese-fest for the so-bad-its-good category.  What I got instead was a movie that was actually pretty decent in the tone of the old Clash of the Titans movie.

Now, it’s probably worth pointing out that I like the old Clash of the Titans movie, so this is, in fact, a compliment.  The reason I like both of these movies though is that they take the setting and characters from mythology, and tell an interesting story.  A scholar of Egyptian mythology might disagree (I’m actually interested in what Ian thinks of it), but for me it was accurate enough for what it was trying to do.

The other thing I really liked about this movie was that it had a tempo.  This wasn’t one, long, two-hour, fight scene like it could have been.  Instead, it had some action sequences, but it also had scenes where the characters had meaningful dialog.  This allowed the movie to process the action sequences and give them meaning by motivating the characters’ actions (beyond, “he took my kingdom!”)

One thing that Cam commented to me afterward about was that Beck and Zaya actually seemed rather sincere as a couple.  She knew he was a thief and didn’t want to change/redeem him; she accepted this fact.  When he brought home a fancy dress, she asked him, straight faced, “Did you steal this from a merchant or someone’s closet?” and then proceeded to put it on as though it didn’t matter.  She also gave him the plans to Set’s vault and goaded him in to stealing Horus’s eye, which kicked off the entire movie.

Overall, I enjoyed Gods of Egypt, and give it a solid recommendation if you are in to romps through mythology (especially Egyptian mythology).  It certainly has a bit of an 80s flair for the dramatic, but it pulls it off with modern sensibilities well enough that the movie feels like it was made this decade.