Even months in advance, the director, Alex Proyas, had to apologize for the movie’s mainly white cast (it is, after all, set in ancient Egypt). In the last few days Gods has been bashed by nearly every review out there—here’s a roundup of some choice quotes:
Here, at the New Republic, Will Leitch said that, “Gods of Egypt is a movie that requires more effort to sit through than it did to make it,” (which, considering the amount of CGI involved, was probably a lot) and that the whole movie was cast with a bunch of “Sam Worthingtons.”
The New York Times questioned why the movie was even ever made: “[Gods of Egypt] is instead a demented entertainment, an embarrassment of kitsch riches that, in between inspiring giggles and snorts, incites you to consider imponderables like, who greenlighted this, and why?”
At Gizmodo, Charlie Jane Anders captured the movie’s true despair, stating, “Gods of Egypt feels like such an abdication of story, and such a bastardization of culture, that the only sane response is to abandon sanity, and enlist in the murder-police of the senseless new era.”
And, my personal favorite, from Variety: “With its burnt-yellow cinematography, its excessively gilded production design, and its blinding flashes of sunlight, Gods of Egypt at times doesn’t suggest a movie so much as a giant cinematic tanning salon—all the better, perhaps, to darken the pearlescent skin tones of most of the actors on display.”