Gods of Egypt

Gods of Egypt is a Shitburger. Trust me on this; I once worked at a Wienerschnitzel, so I know a thing or two about shitburgers. What’s more interesting than the shitburger itself, though, is how the shitburger gets to market.

Imagine you own a burger shop and you want to create the best damn hamburger you possibly can. You hire the best food scientists money can buy. They say,  “We’ll make you the hottest, juiciest, tastiest burger imaginable.” And after a couple months they come back with something hot and juicy, but it’s got the texture of dogshit. 

“Don’t worry,” say the scientists, “it looks like shit right now, but when we’re done it’ll taste so good nobody’ll care.” 

You’re a little concerned, but you’ve spent so much money already that you send them back to their lab to keep going. After a little while, they bring you the second iteration of all their work. It still looks like shit, and now it smells like shit, too. 

You’re worried, but the scientists remind you they’re experts and promise they aren’t done. They’ll fix it and your burger will taste so fucking great that the last thing people talk about is how shitty it looks and smells.

When the scientists come back they proudly unveil the final product, the result of all their hard work and your money. It still looks like shit, and smells like shit, but now it also tastes like shit. 

You bought a shitburger. A very expensive shitburger. 

You can get angry, you can bust those God damn scientists’ nerd glasses and clipboards, call them bad names, and tell them to “Sit on it!” until you’re blue in the face. But you ignored the warning signs along the way, you didn’t pull the plug before it was too late, and now you’re stuck with a steaming pile of shitburger. As a human being with a conscience, you can’t sell this thing; you won’t make people eat shit.  

That’s the difference between you and Hollywood’s grassfuckers. They don’t see the a toxic pile of dung; they see a marketing challenge. The grassfuckers could have stopped the shitburger that is Gods of Egypt before it made it into the mouths of customers. They could have admitted that the script looked like shit, that the early cuts from director Alex Proyas smelled like shit, that the movie they made tastes like shit. Instead they choose to believe people want to eat shit.

Shitburger opens in an Egypt that ever existed, one where gods and men live together with the gods in charge and twice as big as people. This land only appears to exist in the imagination of CGI developer who has only ever seen 1950s Hercules movies and had only a laptop and an old copy of Microsoft Paint to work with. I mean, there is not a single part of this movie where the background didn’t look as fake as the Harelip’s hair extensions.

A stupid young man named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) takes a break from being in a dreamy British boy band to shoplift a dress for his girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton), who’s as hot as microwaved oatmeal and just as bland,. She will wear it to the coronation of a new king. In Gods of Egypt’s logic, we’re supposed to root for Bek, even though his first act is to steal. Why? Because the soundtrack is “fun” while he steals. Throughout this movie, the fucking relentless score tells you exactly what to feel. I guess that’s because the story doesn’t. And we’re supposed to care about his love story why? I guess because Zaya is to vain and simple to worry about anything but how she looks.

The current king, god Osiris (Bryan Brown) is about to hand over the crown to his son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Right when he is about to, though, the naughty prodigal son Set (Gerard Butler) pops in and fucks shit up. By fucks shit up I mean he kills his dad and rips out of both of his brother’s eyeballs, then declares himself king. I saw the exact same thing happen at a quinceañera once. It was more fun then because there was a piñata.

Set is an asshole. Not so much for the eyeball thing. The movie doesn’t bother giving us enough backstory to care. He’s an asshole because he looks and acts like a University of Wisconsin linebacker fifteen years past his playing days. Like he didn’t get drafted and now he’s working in real estate, has that Midwestern thickness, and was never able to transition to the real world where nobody gave a shit about him. He scowls a lot and complains more. Butler, like everyone else in this movie, seems to have made a deliberate choice to avoid being interesting. 

Also, to be almost all white. All these white dudes playing Egyptians is a weird choice. Maybe the moviemakers are a bunch of racists who claim they couldn’t find qualified middle-easterners and blacks to play the roles. That would be a lie, though, because they didn’t need qualified people for this shit.

Zaya, the oatmeal, dies. I don’t even remember how, but I know Bek is bummed and he blames the former nose tackle from Madison. He teams with Horus and they go on an adventure that makes almost no sense, has no correlation to Egyptian mythology, has zero emotional heft and gave me the strange sensation that I wasn’t watching but maybe been playing Mario 64 while high on szirrup. There are woman riding giant cobras, a grandpa (Geoffrey Rush doing a dead-on impression of a sleeping James Woods) floating in space on Paul Allen’s yacht, blue crystal skulls, scenes lifted from straight-to-video Indiana Jones ripoffs, an attempt to cull body parts from various gods to make a supergod, and giant metal robots that the gods can transform into when they’re angry. Sort of like hieroglyphic Incredible Hulks. 

The characters suck. They’re dumb and bland, the product of unclever moviemakers who just didn’t give a fuck. The story doesn’t know whether to go for funny or serious, and alternates between them with no warning. When “funny,” they joke like two guys working at the DMV who think their lives would make a great sitcom. When serious, they engage in bouts of exposition with more wood than an all-boys high school that’s been circulating a Candy Bottoms’ DVD. 

It’s non-stop horseshit. There’s plenty of action, but mostly without context because the world of Gods of Egypt has no rules or boundaries. The purpose of Bek and Horus’s quest, and their needs are uninteresting and shifting. Watching this is like playing a game with a three-year-old, and letting him make the rules. If you’ve never done this, don’t. Especially not with money on the line. I’ve lost so much that way.

It’s so fucking bad, in fact that at one point a character declares “Set is changing the rules!” as though that diabolical act was thought up by an on-screen character, not a hack writer.

Yet, I admit that thirty minutes into Gods of Egypt I was laughing my ass off. I thought it was a joke, that nobody could make a shitburger this steamy without knowing. Gods of Egypt must be a meta-movie, a commentary on the bland awfulness of modern movies, on the dangers of relying on CGI for everything, and the way action has usurped story as the purpose of cinema.

But then, Gods of Egypt kept going for another 90 long, steaming dogshit minutes and my smile disappeared. It is not a joke. It is a shitburger, bad in every possible way: acting, effects, music, story, jokes. It is shitty mess being crammed down our throats. One Finger.