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| Ancient Egypt invariably fails on film. Why? |
Why does ancient Egypt fail on film? They may have decoded hieroglyphs, but there seems to be no filmic Rosetta Stone to translate the wonders of this civilization into great film.
Who do we blame most - the art department, the costume, make-up, writing, acting or directorial departments?
Most film reviews are the digestions of jaded palates, but this is not one of them. I love ancient Egypt-based films, yet I have to admit that almost none of them really deserves my affection.
Here are eight:
Cleopatra, The Awakening, The Egyptian, Sphinx, The Mummy (Original), Land of the Pharaohs, The Mummy series (Brendan Fraser), Stargate
Ancient Egypt as a theme tends to produce unsatisfactory movies and Egypt is generally more palatable when used in a pastiche sense, such as in the Indiana Jones or Brendan Fraser's Mummy series.
Ancient Egyptian costumes inevitably look campy and somehow pantomime.
The accents grate, whether clinically British or amusingly American, as in: "O Mighty Fearo, I come from Rorme. May the guards of Egypt be with you!"
The dialogue as stiff as old Imhotep in his wrappings.
The make-up is operatic.
The sets seem like monumental excess today. Too Hollywood for Hollywood.
Every movie seems like a series of stagy set-pieces
So what is the answer? Maybe there's greater satisfaction to be found in reading ancient Egypt fiction instead.
In the end, only the 'Egypt of the Mind' - your mind - really translates this lost civilization to today.
I enjoyed Ridley Scott's visual style, (as always) but as a lifelong student of ancient Egypt, I winced a bit at the
appearance of a camel in the movie, a later introduction to Arabic Egypt, as well
as at the sight of Egyptian commoners shown wearing the royal nemes headdress. I was also dismayed to see scenes of
Egyptian soldiery going into battle mounted on horseback.
Horses in ancient Egypt were of a smaller breed and not
suitable for riding.
Ancient royalty, especially, shunned the
inelegance of riding on horseback and reserved their horses for drawing
chariots.
Was Rameses even the pharaoh of the Exodus?
Most likely
in my view.
I will give
the filmmakers credit for that.
As the
leading Rameses scholar Ken Kitchen points out, Moses made appeals to pharaoh
on a daily basis - and that could only have been to Rameses II at his Delta
city of Pi-Rameses, in the vicinity of the Israelite's region of Goshen.
That
fingers Rameses as the recalcitrant pharaoh who kept on defying God.
FOOTNOTE: Movie theatres and Egypt
