A 10.25 Hollywood Reporter piece by Paul Bond quotes Exodus star Christian Bale by way of a 10.21 Christianity Today article by Drew Turney, and to me it’s hilarious. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic,” Bale told reporters during a recent Los Angeles sitdown. “He was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life…a very troubled and tumultuous man who fought greatly against God, against his calling.”
So much for the staunch Christian view of the man, which was more or less delivered in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments. I don’t know if Christian nutters will rise up in protest and give Exodus shit the way they dumped all over Noah, but it probably won’t matter if they do. The fact is that Noah did pretty well at the end of the day — $101 million domestic, $359 million worldwide.
On another note I’m a tiny bit disappointed in director Ridley Scott‘s decision not to magically part the Red Sea in the old-fashioned Charlton Heston way but with the lucky intervention of an earthquake.
Scott recently told Entertainment Weekly‘s Sara Wilkomerson in a 10.25 posting that he wanted realism, not Godly magic. “‘You can’t just do a a giant parting, with walls of water trembling while people ride between them,'” he told EW, referring to the Ten Commandments version. “’I didn’t believe it [in 1956], when I was just a kid sitting in the third row. I remember that feeling, and thought that I’d better come up with a more scientific or natural explanation.’
“Scott’s solution came from a deep dive into the history of Egypt circa 3000 B.C. After reading that a massive underwater earthquake off the coast of Italy caused a tsunami, he thought about how water recedes as a prelude to such disasters. ‘I thought that logically, [the parting] should be a drainage. And that when [the water] returns, it comes back withe a vengeance.” Here’s a 5,000-year-old spoiler alert: That’s what happens when Moses (Bale) leads the no-longer-enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt, with leader Ramses (Joel Edgerton) in close pursuit.”
