Gods of Egypt Director Blames Critics For Box Office Failure

Dragon Zero

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Apr 16, 2009
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I really liked Dark City. I wish this movie was as good. I can understand feeling this way after something you put a lot of effort into turns to shit in your hands but I don't think it was the best idea to make this public display.
 

Flatfrog

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Matthew Parkinson lauded Gods of Egypt's "unbelievably unoriginal" plot, childish dialogue, uninspired character arcs, and atrocious and excessive reliance on computer animation as the main reasons that the film was a "disaster."
I don't think that word means what you think it means
 

Flatfrog

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EbonBehelit said:
If you look at his Rotten Tomatoes page, a 'descent into mediocrity' is a quite fitting description of what you'll see. Also, apparently Dark City and The Crow were well-received by critics - even at the time they were first released - so I dunno where he's getting his idea of near-universal critical panning from.
Absolutely!

Roger Ebert:
"Dark City'' by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis'' and "2001: A Space Odyssey.
James Berardinelli (Reel Views):
. It's rare for any film maker, whether a veteran or a newcomer, to create the kind of compelling, endlessly-fascinating environment that Proyas brought to the screen in The Crow. Now, with his follow-up movie, Dark City, the director incredibly manages to one-up himself.
New York Times:
The elements of that ride suggest that Proyas, who masterminded the popular teen-age mind-blower "The Crow," is a walking encyclopedia of weird science-fiction and horror imagery. At its best, the movie feels like a magician's trick, a gleefully improvised demonic fantasy of ominous evil genies conjured out of bottles and stirred into a steamy swirl that brings in everything from Franz Kafka to Vincent Price, from Fritz Lang to "Star Trek."
Even the less enthusiastic reviews are pretty good:
San Francisco Chronicle:
The plot is weak, and the self- conscious script tries too hard to be knowing and sexually suggestive. Judging from the dialogue alone, "Dark City" is a clumsy melodrama. But the film's twisting of reality and its daring look -- layered and off-kilter grays, greens and blacks -- make it click.
Empire:
while the majority of the performances are serviceable, it's the sheer overwhelming style that gets Dark City through. Proyas drenches each shot in a unique feel and delivers a movie with a visual sense with all the inventive, poetic power of Ridley Scott or Terry Gilliam firing on all cylinders.
 

PBMcNair

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Aug 31, 2009
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Implying Europeans like Shyamalans The Last Airbender


OT: That thing I'd only heard about due to peoples complaints bombed ?
Say it isn't so.
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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undeadsuitor said:
Honestly, I'm just impressed that they knew barely enough about Egyptian mythology to cast Set as the villain instead of Anubis. Sure, Set wasn't totally evil, but it's a better decision than all the Greek mythology movies casting Hades as the bad guy.
Never understood all the Hades hate myself. Zeus was the one going around as animals, and surprise sexing people.
 

Pinky's Brain

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Samtemdo8 said:
generic comteporary action movies like Taken, Shoot-Em-Up and London Has Fallen.
When Taken came out there hadn't been a good one man revenge/rescue movie for a long time and calling Shoot-Em-Up generic is just ridiculous.

The slightly familiar mythology with a twist grandiose fantasy movie has had a lot of play in the last decade (all failures).
 

Thaluikhain

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008Zulu said:
undeadsuitor said:
Honestly, I'm just impressed that they knew barely enough about Egyptian mythology to cast Set as the villain instead of Anubis. Sure, Set wasn't totally evil, but it's a better decision than all the Greek mythology movies casting Hades as the bad guy.
Never understood all the Hades hate myself. Zeus was the one going around as animals, and surprise sexing people.
One of the ones, Hades abducted Persephone.

I suspect it's because Satan has his job in the Christian set up, though.
 

hermes

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008Zulu said:
undeadsuitor said:
Honestly, I'm just impressed that they knew barely enough about Egyptian mythology to cast Set as the villain instead of Anubis. Sure, Set wasn't totally evil, but it's a better decision than all the Greek mythology movies casting Hades as the bad guy.
Never understood all the Hades hate myself. Zeus was the one going around as animals, and surprise sexing people.
Christians would often adapt elements of a different culture to help evangelize foreigners and ease some of their concepts.

In the case of the Greek, the logic was "Hades" therefore "Underworld" equals "Hell" therefore "Satan".
 

kasperbbs

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Dec 27, 2009
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I didn't need critics to tell me that it's bad.. The trailer made it clear by itself.
 

Gorrath

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His descent into mediocrity isn't something that's merely made up by critics. I don't see how hardly anyone watches Dark City and then sees this trailer and thinks he hasn't fallen off dramatically. Dark City has its issues, mostly to do with editing IMO, but the film was unique and interesting both in premise and execution. Meanwhile, this overwrought movie with its cheesy, cliche dialogue looks awful no matter who you are.
 

EHKOS

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Wow, I thought this would have been a decent movie. The trailer with the giant snake made me want to see it. I would have guessed it would have been popular.
 

faefrost

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Programmed_For_Damage said:
Fappy said:
I actually saw this atrocity. Ask me anything!
Alright. From the trailers it looks like The Mummy crossed with Clash Of The Titans. Is that a correct assumption? Also, those two films at least achieved a decent level of popcorn-chomping escapism. What do you reckon went wrong here?
And that's it right there. Why did it fail? The trailer looked like a generic movie SyFy spits out on a weekend. Bad video game cutscene level CGI presenting what looked like the same movie we had already seen 6 times in the past 18 months alone. Including 2 Hercules's. Honestly it sure as hell didn't look like a Proyas movie. People had written it off as "likely garbage" long before any critic said a word, just on the basis of the awful uninspiring blue mess overly CGI trailer.
 

shintakie10

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tf2godz said:
bartholen said:
OT: Wow, what a spectacular nail to punch into the coffin of this carcass of a movie. I haven't seen it, and I'm very not of the PolitCorrect crowd, but even I thought "what the hell were they thinking?" when they cast Nicolaj Coster-Waldau and Gerard Butler as egyptian gods. Had they cast egyptian, or even middle eastern people, they would have at least walked away with just the movie being a piece of shit, and without the added stain of whitewashing.
I'll say the same thing that I said when Exodus: Gods and Kings bombed. black and Middle Eastern actors dodge a fucking bullet. If they casted them in this not only would they probably never act again but big Hollywood wigs would just blame that for its failure and be even more reluctant to cast them in the future. so I don't really mind.
While I still would have liked to see some non-white people as leads in this movie, I do have to agree with this.

Its fuckin horrid logic, but movie directors don't cast poc because they don't think that poc draw as well as white people. Having them be leads in a movie that bombs this spectacularly wouldnt do them any favors on that front.
 

Ukomba

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ravenshrike said:
Ukomba said:
ravenshrike said:
Ukomba said:
I wish people would stop using identity politics arguments against movies, games, books, ext. It just muddies the water unnecessarily. The movies bad. Last Air Bender was bad. The end. The makeup of the movies is irrelevant.

Would perfect casting have saved either movie? No.
Hey now, that's going a bit far. Silly and hammy, sure, but nowhere NEAR TLAB bad.
Which? Gods of Egypt or Last Air Bender, because Last Air Bender is a very nearly the Godwin's Law for movies.
Gods of Egypt is nowhere NEAR as bad as TLAB. At worst, it's Jeremy Irons D&D bad, with a little less ham because the only actor who could out ham Irons was Raul Julia.
You're right you're right. The Last Air Bender is that special kind of painful bad that fails on every level. GOE is at least a spectacle. The only connection is a similar complaint about race.
 

pacouranga

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Proyas is one of a special breed of people who cannot, for the life of them, take any sort of criticism no matter how badly needed or richly deserved. Every criticism is transformed into a personal attack or conspiracy and, when riled, they shoot back along those same lines.

The smartest thing a director can do is surround himself with people who are smarter and better artist than himself and listen to every word they say. They might have set him right on the "trailer looks terrible" or "don't cast ancient Egyptians as white" or "overuse of CGI special effects is what killed Star Wars" problems among others.
 

maninahat

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Zontar said:
What I want to know is who this was made for. No seriously, which audience was this made for? Because "fantasy movie about gods in ancient times" is not a general audience targeted movie, at least not unless it's part of a series that has eased audiences in first with more grounded movies.
I can't blame him in that respect. There are a bunch of forgotten blockbuster genres that directors have been trying to get out of retirement: The successful ones are comic book movies, pirates and space. These are the kind of movies that would spectacularly flop a couple of decades back, but now make for billion dollar franchises. Mad Max is a cult movie series that hasn't been relevant in decades, so who exactly asked for Fury Road? Doesn't matter, that film was great. Directors and producers are desperate to find the next thing to re-invigorate.

The problem is that they keep fucking it up. Failed ones include movies about the wild west, bible epics and (in this case) ancient mythology. I think I'd love a good Egyptian pantheon themed movie, but we got a bad one.
 

Flathole

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008Zulu said:
I'm surprised he isn't blaming piracy as well. Why have one scapegoat when you can have two?

Plus bad mouthing critics? I'm sure that will go over well when he makes his next movie.
Why have one scapegoat when you can have them ALL?


People ask me, 'why did Gods of Egypt fail?' and it's really a complicated answer. see, the critics hate on me for being more successful for them, everyone loves my movies but pirates them, racists and misogynists are threatened by my movies and their portraits of intricate believable futures without white men, political extremists hate my movies for exposing them as the lying hatemongers they are, the movies were badly promoted and the studios I work with are garbage, marijuana addicts hate my movies because they don't want to assess their lives realistically, also I knew Obama from grade 6 and he swore I 'stole' his girlfriend even though he never talked to her.

I'm basically like Leonardo De Vinci or Jesus Christ, I'm a brilliant artist who refuses to bow down to the system and the drooling masses can't handle my revolutionary beliefs and style. In the future I'll be remembered as one of- no, THE greatest director to ever live, but for now I'm being held back because I have a rare mental illness called 'being God' and people just hate what isn't familiar.

Did I miss any? I should work for Hollywood PR. Sometimes the drama surrounding a movie is better then the movie itself. I didn't even care about it before, now I just HAVE to see it. Was that their plan all along?