Monday, March 7, 2016

GODS OF EGYPT - Battle of 2 Gods

This was the first time that I watched a movie without knowing what the story was. I only know from my wife that this is the type of movie that I would like. Well she is right in the sense that I always like movies that are having lots of action, special effects, great sound system. I like to be "wowed" when watching movie.
Maybe people will think that's too shallow, but hey, that's what I want to feel when I go to see a movie in the cinema. I am very sure a lot of you would also love to be entertained just like me. A movie does not have to be Oscar nominated in order to entertain people (see how many people loved to watch Fast & Furious, Jurassic World, Marvel movies, Transformers, etc). Ok, enough rambling from my side. If you are still interested in finding out about this movie, feel free to continue.

I have mentioned in my earlier post about "Zootopia", that it was the first of my personal "movie marathon". This was the 2nd movie that I watched on that day. Movie starts with intro about Gods and their creation, humans, all live side by side in the Egypt. Gods can be easily differentiated as they are much taller and bigger than human, and their blood is of gold while humans are red. These Gods can also transform themselves into some different animal shape. It was told there are 2 Gods, Osiris a great God worshipped and loved by human and his brother Set (played by Gerard Butler - 300, Olympus Has Fallen etc) who is more like War God. Osiris wants to resign from the throne and pass it to his son Horus (played by Nicolai Coster-Waldau - Game of Thrones).
The story is being told from the point of view of Bek (played by Brenton Thwaites), a small time thief who is very much in love with Zaya (played by Courtney Eaton - Mad Max: Fury Road).

During the celebration of Horus' initiation to become king, Set suddenly came and provide a special gift to Horus. When Horus blew the horn given by Set, many soldiers came at once. Set then forced Osiris to fight him to become the ruler of Egypt which Osiris refused. As we all would have guessed, Set then killed Osiris, making Horus very angry and vengeful. Horus tried to fight Set but he was easily defeated as Set is a much better fighter & have more experience than him. Set took both Horus' eyes which are Horus' source of power. As Set was about to kill him, Hathor the goddes of love (played by Elodie Yung) who is in love with Horus, begged Set to spare his life. All other gods there obeyed Set and did not dare to fight, including Thoth, God of knowledge.

After 1 year passed, Egypt has become very bad for both humans (mostly become slaves) and the gods that cannot accept Set becoming king. Horus was banished to a temple. Hathor has been married to Set and Zaya became slave for Urshu, the architect who was assigned by Set to build a very high tower for worshipping Ra - God of the Sun (played by Geoffrey Rush). 

Bek was convinced by Zaya to steal the eyes of Horus by going inside the temple built by Urshu using the map stolen from Urshu's library since Zaya believes that only Horus can save all of Egypt. With the experience of being a thief, Bek was able to go through the various obstacles and stole the eye. Unfortunately when Bek returned to Zaya, Urshu found out about their plan and tried to capture them.
Bek finally arrived at the temple where Horus was banished and give the eye to Horus. After some fighting and convincing to do, Horus finally agreed that Horus will fight Set and return the order to Egypt. 

Before they start on their journey to revenge Set, both of them worshipped Ra so Horus can meet and request the help from Ra to make him able to transform again to his animal shape, the falcon. However, Ra disagrees as he believes Horus must learn and try to find the solution himself. Ra also said that he has to fight the shadow demon every day and thus cannot leave his post.

So now both Bek and Horus embarked on a journey to locate Set's shrine where they would be able to reduce Set's power using the "magical" waters from Ra's vessel. This journey would include fighting with Set's armies, and going through the temple of ashes and solving the riddle by sphinx.
All this while Set was trying to capture all the powers from other gods to make him invincible. 

So will Horus be able to avenge Set when he is becoming nearly impossible to defeat? Will Bek ever got his mission accomplished? Is Hathor going to be together again with Horus? Can Horus finally become the king? Find out through their adventures and journey.

I had some excited moments watching the fights and the adventures. Fighting scenes are good. But, as my wife has pointed out to me, I also feel the CGI especially for background pictures are not good. You can really see they are computerized pictures (I even feel like watching scenes from computer games that I play) which is odd considering it has a very big budget > USD 100 million. Anyway, despite all that, I think the movie's length is just nice as we get enough time to complete the whole story. Personally I always think that an adventure or action movie should always have 3 parts, i.e. opening part where usually we get to see the main character's capabilities, love interest etc. 2nd part is the part where they would be given all the "trials", difficulties etc and must be able to overcome them. Finally the 3rd part would be the ultimate fight scene. I believe this movie is having all of those in sufficient amount of time.

In conclusion, if you are interested in watching an adventure, fantasy movie combined with sword fighting and creature slaying scenes, you should watch this one. But do not expect brutal type of fighting as this is PG 13 and I think Exodus: Gods and Kings would suit you better. This is more like Prince of Persia. So if you do not like this kind of movie, or you are really into an Academy Award quality movie, please do not watch this. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars 

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