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The Ten Commandments of Hercules

First off, I'm glad to see special effects haven't gotten any better since Heston's days. When we first put it on, I had to doublecheck to make sure we hadn't accidently clicked onto an episode of "Hercules" or "Zena". Did Sam Raimi direct?

I had a dead-tree version of the source material on hand, and was trying to follow along through all the thee's and thouest's, but apparently the filmmakers decided it needed a bit of touching up. It seems they decided just improvving the book of Leviticus was a better way to go than simply making a movie version of a segment of the all-time champion bestseller. Mel Gibson proved the folly of that route, I suppose. Instead, there's alot more moral debate and "Character" work, which would've been neat, aside from the fact that it has no place in the story (it's called "The Ten Commandments", not "Moses makes a constipated face") and that they apparently picked up some random homeless British guy to play Moses.

This was the one aspect I had figured they'd get right, the multi-culti Hollywood types. Blue-Eyed Moses? There wasn't a Jewish actor up to snuff for this thing? I keep hearing how the Jews run Hollywood, couldn't they go get the producer's nephew or something?

Anyway, have you looked at Leviticus lately? It's like fifty pages of rules, rules, more rules, followed by four more books that are mostly more rules. I didn't get to watch the very end (which sucks, that part is, after all, the point of the movie, at least in theory), but for a movie based on a book about a guy on speakerphone with God hisself laying out the laws by which the majority of the world will live for the next 3500 years, there sure seemed to be a lot of ambiguity about what, exactly, God was saying.

Instead, the Ten Commandments get relegated to the last few minutes so Mose can agonize over his wife leaving him, static on the line with God (what's ancient Hebrew for "Can you hear me now?"), and various other interpersonal issues. In the book, most of this stuff is pretty straightforward: In one instance, Mose is dealing out the law, his father-in-law (Jethro, tee hee) steps in and says, "Dood, that ain't right", Mose says "Yeah, let's do it your way". End of story, let's lay out the rules for how to herd sheep.

At least in the (also pretty awful) old version, our blue-eyed Moses is pretty adamant about what's going on, with all the "LET MY PEOPLE GO" and stuff. This incarnation of Moses sortof pesters Pharoh until God gets so bored with waiting he sends the plauges while Moses pulls yet another constipated face at his (invented? I couldn't find him, but I'm no scholar) Egyptian brother.

And so on through the movie. I had hoped it would get better the second night, but I don't know why I had that hope, I should've known it would be, if anything, worse. I did get a kick out of the thing, mostly just to make fun of it, as I would watching any other cheesy made for teevee movie with the added fun of trying to read along in my quite dusty bible. I know what they were doing, trying to Humanize the cannonized figure of Moses, but sometime maybe they ought to try celebrating, rather than downplaying, the things that made Moses more than a man, and make him and his teachings so much more enduring than himself or his petty relationships.

Posted by Francis at April 12, 2006 03:27 AM | TrackBack