Breathtaking in its panorama of ancient Egypt and unrelenting in its depiction of Israelite slavery and ten plagues alike, Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings is an epic film intent on deflating social and political -- and religious – ideals.  Scott’s scenario is provided by writers Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zailin. The film posits a rivalry between Moses (Christian Bale) and Ramses (Joel Edgerton) that starts as a macho contest in war to see which brother can save whom, but ends with a tournament over who can be husband and father in a struggle over redemption.

In this contest, the film would have us pity the pharaoh who tells his baby more than once: “You sleep so well because you are loved, but I never slept as well.”  And yes, the film would have us pity the Egyptians, especially when the plagues begin. This movie’s Moses sighs, “It’s not easy to see the people I grew up with, suffering.”

At first Moses returns to train the slaves, military style, in the methods of revolution and guerilla warfare, in how to cut off Egypt’s food and other supply lines, to carry out mass terrorism. But then he gets religion and learns to leave the terrorism to God. In this film’s version, Moses confronts Ramses only once before the plagues begin, to bully his unloved brother into releasing the slaves. Ramses then adopts Holocaust-like measures, such as burning the bodies of the slaves. Moses asks him, “You call that order?”

Moses tells Ramses that the slaves should be treated like Egyptians and should be paid for their work. But all these pleas for justice come after Moses, on his own, confronts Ramses in a very nasty way, even before Moses finds religion. The Ramses here is rather ambivalent about Moses, who seems to get his attention for a moment when he says, “Do not call them [the slaves] animals.” Ramses responds to the effect that from an economic standpoint it is not yet feasible to free the slaves. He asks for time.

Exodus is not interested in presenting a divine source of justice and truth. Early on in the film, the writers get Miriam to lie about being Moses’ sister and being a Hebrew. Much, but not all, of the bold in-your-face biblical approach of Moses and the Israelites, out of faith in their God, is deleted here. The sheer power of the plagues (arrestingly and memorably depicted) is more emboldening than the force of a divine presence.  Moses derives more self-confidence from a sword given to him by the old pharaoh (more endearing in this film than any of the Jewish elders).

Why should this Moses wield a staff when he has been given such a sword? As Moses tells his wife Zipporah during his agnostic (and more tolerant and rational) period: “Is it bad to grow up believing in yourself?”  But it would seem, again, that a lot of his self-confidence comes from the sword, though to the writers’ credit, it is given no Merlin-era powers. In the movie’s version of the famous biblical scene in which Moses helps the women at the well and meets his beloved Zipporah, it is pharaoh’s sword, not a push by Moses for right and justice, that gives him authority. In fact Moses helps himself to the water before he exercises any chivalry, if he exercises it at all.

Zipporah believes in a god who does not want people to climb one particular mountain. It would seem that Moses has a meet and greet with that god when he chases some sheep up that mountain to retrieve them from possible danger. Moses is hit in the head by avalanching rocks, and only then sees the proverbial burning bush. A child angel (?), a cherub (?) appears to him and introduces himself as the “I am.” This child-god (Isaac Andrews) tells Moses what Moses does not want to hear but knows he must do for the slaves, and not only because they are relatives, but because of Ramses’ cruelty.

Zipporah then wonders whether the god that she venerated is all that impressive. “What kind of god asks a man to leave his family?” Moses replies that he doesn’t understand it either, but he must go. There is no “Let My people go,” by the way, only an “I gotta go. See ya, Zipporah and I’ll be back, Son Gershom.”

The rather petulant god-child makes no effort to be gracious or graceful in its mannerisms or designs. Clearly, the director called for a deadpan deity, more dismissive in its interactions than awe-inspiring, directing and disciplining. When Moses lectures the deity/manifestation on how wars of attrition must go on for years, the latter tells Moses that it is time for him to sit back and watch. Then the plagues come, one after another, with none of the many opportunities for the pharaoh to relent, or to harden his heart, or to have his heart hardened, until just before the last plague, the killing of the first born, including the pharaoh’s. Is the god-child’s behavior intended as a condemnation of wars of attrition and of whatever leads to them as ipso facto “cycles of violence”?

This movie hardly condemns Ramses for saying, “I am the god.” The Bible takes great pains to emphasize that pharaoh must be taught that he is not God. This movie is far more interested in Ramses’ question to Moses: How can Moses’ deity kill children? But it never lets Moses turn around the question and ask Ramses how he, the pharaoh, can do the same. Instead Moses cracks that none of the Hebrew children died. Is Scott suggesting an unfair “disproportionality” here, or simply that the Israelites obeyed God and placed blood on their doorposts?

Moses spouts a religious vocabulary in the end, but to what end? When the people flee pharaoh’s armies, Moses tells them that God wants them to head to the mountains, while in fact he is not sure. Is he falling back on his wife’s religious principle of “any mountain but.” All the while, of course, Exodus has left open the possibility that the avalanche caused permanent damage to Moses’ brain, or at the very least that his concussion has not had time to heal because of all his revolutionary activity he has had to get under his belt right away. Yet his rhetorical skills are unimpaired (even though the biblical Moses had major speech problems). He tells the people, “You honored me with your trust. Now I honor you with my faith. God is with us.”

Moses catches glimpses of the child-god on a few occasions. But this deity guides him rather loosely -- with kid gloves, as it were. Moses initiates the meetings with the elders, and starts the revolution with them well before any plagues. And Moses definitely holds the hammer and wields it when there are laws to write. The god-child sees the law as some-day guidance in Moses’ stead, telling him to put down the hammer if he disagrees with the need for them. But the impression given here is that they are very much Moses’ bailiwick (whereas Bible and Near Eastern scholars have observed that Hebrew law was unique in that it was regarded as the province of God rather than of a king or official like Hammurabi).

Do the writers regard it as a good thing that the writing of the laws is left to Moses? This movie’s Moses can be a vindictive, facing down sort of guy. He so wants to be in pharaoh’s face that he confronts him on horseback while the Israelites are fleeing the seawaters. He doesn’t care if he drowns. There is, by the way, only one other villain among the Egyptians, an invented character, who is almost as bad as Ramses. This is the viceroy Hegep (Ben Mendelson) in Pithom who occupies luxurious quarters procured with graft and cruelty. He is the one who mouths the vicious canard that the Bible attributes to pharaoh: “These people, they reproduce like a sport.” Moses tells him that he should not be seeking ways to reduce the population of the slaves who make him and Egypt rich. The writers have this guy bring the news of Moses’ Hebrew origins to Ramses, thus ending Moses’ life of luxury. They also make a point of suggesting that this viceroy is a gay man who both hits on Moses and betrays him. Is there an intimation here that the biblical laws regarding homosexuality were shriven by Moses in order to get back at a nasty gay man? If so, this is a rather strange use of gay characters and an even stranger effort to understand the historical background of biblical law.

Whatever this movie’s Moses writes would have to be taken with a grain of salt, anyway. The closest he comes to religious piety is a moment of self-doubt, as the Egyptian armies are gaining on the slaves, when he cries out: “I have misled all of them. I have abandoned my family. I have failed You. I’m not who I thought I was.” Significantly, he throws his beloved sword into the sea. Is he seeking for it to help him somehow, or is he relinquishing an old faithful with hopes that the new faith will then work for him as it seems to be starting to do?

There is no wondrous assertion of right over might here, only a grudging acceptance of inevitable reversals of fortune and power which will bring different injustices at a later time, with different victims. Everybody will use terrorism for his or her own ends. Even the god-child does this and enjoys it. All violence is part of the same kind of “cycle of violence,” the dance between those who have power and those who do not, no matter who the parties are and what has preceded the most recent acts of violence.

Hegep stereotypes the Hebrews as violent and cunning. In fact, they are depicted as doing some plotting. In Scott’s world both the oppressed and the oppressors have to plot. Politics from whatever side is plotting. Scott and his writers suggest that all nationalistic politics require pre-emptive battles. At the beginning of the film, the Egyptians go after the Hittites. Bible readers know that that is a page taken in advance from later Hebrew battles to enter Canaan. The revolutionaries must feel no pain (a la Joshua, who is so depicted) like the wielders of the whip. Politics are masochistic all around.

When Moses is first told that he is a Hebrew, not by God but by Nun (Joshua’s dad), he complains that Nun’s story is not even that good: “I thought you [Hebrews] were better storytellers.” Is it thus suggested that in the interminable cycles of violence, the best storytellers have the momentary advantage? After all, this Moses is concerned about what will happen when the Israelites have to take Canaan until he becomes so caught up in the story that he does not even think about the escape route in advance.

The views of politics and society in Exodus: Gods and Kings will be familiar to anyone who has followed Scott’s TV series, The Good Wife. That show is the story of Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), a Chicago woman who, after being betrayed by her politician husband, forges a career at a prestigious law firm and then runs for attorney general. Her political advisors, the chief of whom is Jewish and a virtuoso of back room strategies, tell her that she cannot keep her atheism on record if she wants to get elected. In a telling episode written by Leonard Dick, Alicia tells her teenage daughter, who has become an Evangelical Christian, that Alicia’s “struggle with God,” for the sake of the media, is “purely political.” Her daughter chooses not to judge her (a rather nifty act of Christian outreach on her part, but one that she will regret because of the misrepresentations that ensue). The daughter coaches her mom on religious terminology for a key interview with a minister. The episode fits the mold of the series in which religion and everything else is considered political, and discussions of hot-button issues like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Islamism are to be avoided, lest there be loss of votes and loss of power.

The moral relativity of both Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Good Wife is astounding. But Ridley Scott is very politic, especially in the movie, while promulgating the same approach to religion and politics as in his TV series. A ticket buyer can leave convinced that the ten plagues are miraculous, or can be explained as natural cause and effect; that the child-god is a portent of Christmas, or is conjured up by concussion and/or conscience. Moses and Ramses both care about their families, even though one uses Nazi tactics to repress slaves and the other may have to do the same in order to enter a promised land. But all things being equal, in Scott’s world and in his politics, all things are equal, anyway.