Gods Of Egypt

Gods of Egypt is a movie that faced a lot of criticism by the time the casting was announced. People lashed out at a mostly white cast for a movie supposed to be in a pre-historical Egypt. The director has said that the movie is not set in ancient Egypt in any way; however, that doesn’t excuse trying to have the audience suspend belief that Egypt prior to the colonization of the African continent would not be predominantly populated by people of African and, to a lesser extent, Mediterranean descent. Even ignoring these problems, the movie has so many places it could have done so well that one could have ignored poor casting choices. Instead, the casting is just the surface of the problems one finds.

The premise of the movie is simple: Gods of Egypt is a retelling of the major battles between Set and Horus and the events surrounding them. It is definitely a retelling; it doesn’t try to stay true to any one account. But, from the beginning there are some major

The Sphynx guarding Set’s temple is the Greek Sphynx, not the Egyptian. It tells riddles and eats anyone who can’t answer them. The Egyptian one is actually a protector, and the only similarity between the movie and the myth is that the human parts are male, where the Greek is female. After all this, Thoth dies. We learn that Set is collecting the body parts which have special attributes of the gods he’s killed to make himself into some sort of meta-god. He has Osiris’s heart, Nephthys’ wings, Horus’ eye that Bek couldn’t find, and Thoth’s brain. At the end, Horus kills Set. That’s right; instead of banishing him back to his desert, Horus completely kills a major god. This leaves a rather large space in who is supposed to be god of what, doesn’t it? Also, since Isis is supposed to have revived Osiris, we have no god of the afterlife. No god of the desert and human evil, no god of the afterlife, no goddess of marriage and