Gods of Egypt AKA: Lets make everyone in Egypt British or American

Found out this was a thing thanks to Alex Navarro's twitter.....Oh my if you thought Exodus: Gods and Kings was whitewashing at its worst...That was nothing compared to this

Also how the hell did Alex Proyas go from The Crow to this?

Oh yea i forgot the budget of this movie is $140 million

Haha. I was part of the VFX team on this film. And on Exodus, incidentally.

*sigh*

@dudeglove said:

I can't even count the number of ways this is amazing.

If you want to see whitewashing at it's best, check out the "Better Roots" sketch on the new "w/ Bob and David" Mr. Show spiritual successor on Netflix.

It's been a while since I laughed that hard at sketch comedy.

I never really understand the whitewashing complaint people make against these sorts big budget movies. It's not a fault of the movies or the casting directors. If anything it's more the fault of Hollywood as a whole and its lack of diversity in the actors that become big. If they wanted to cast actual Egyptians, how many active actors of Egyptian decent even live in or near Hollywood or are willing to travel there to act, and of that percentage how many are actually solid actors? I would wager not that many people.

The biggest injustice here seems to me that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is the protagonist and deserves so much better than he has so far when it comes to US movies.

(If you don't like GOT or think his Jaime Lannister portrayal is a one trick pony, check out Headhunters. That guy kicks ass!)

Movie itself looks so dumb that i cannot even get invested in whitewashing debates.

@frybird: I feel the same way about Gerard Butler. I think the guy can do better.

@liquidprince: So riddle me this, why did they rewrite an Indian-American character in the Martian to be half-black so they could cast a black guy? And why did they decide to recast a Korean-American character to be a white lady?

Nope, he really can't.

The movie looks dumb and ridiculous and I'm going to watch it cause fuck it

Thats a little harsh. Before Matthew Mcconaughey made an active choice to pursue serious roles no one would have ever thought the guy from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and other fine romantic comedies would ever be an Oscar worthy contender.

@dudeglove: I never said that there were no solid actors in other countries. In fact I said that it was the problem with Hollywood as a whole that the core group of actors and well known faces lack diversity. It's hard for directors of these big budget movies to hire some random actor of whatever ethnic background not knowing the acting chops or if their faces will sell, when they can just hire some well known white actor. It's like what happened when they cast Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia and a bunch of people were like why not hire an actual Persian dude? As a Persian myself, it never bothered me that much because oustide of a few actors (of which none of them actually live in the states) I can't imagine someone carrying a multimillion dollar movie. What does that mean? It means that Hollywood needs to branch out as a whole and diversify signifacntly so that ethnic actors become as recognizable as white ones so that this becomes a non discussion of do we hire white dude or ethnic dude. At that point ethnic dude is as viable as can be.

No clue. Haven't seen the movie and am not familiar with its source material. Racism?

You could make that argument about literally anybody. Everyone has the potential to improve. I'll believe it when I see it.

Considering this looks to basically be a fantasy movie, and not even remotely historical, I have absolutely zero problem with this

That said though, the movie in question doesn't seem too great based on that trailer... I want to like Gerard Butler, I really do...

@sweep: stop it

@sweep: I'd argue that you actually couldn't make that argument about anybody but yah all I'm saying is the guy seems like he could possibly do some decent acting if given the chance. We will see. I looked over his movie history and I completely agree that it's not very good, but there were some glimpses of nuance here and there unlike let's say Jai Courtney who you just know will never do anything of worth.

I think I've played this game before...

@liquidprince: I haven't seen the movie myself either but I'll take a wild guess that they shoehorned in an African American and female part in there to appease the growing social pressure of equal racial diversity at all costs. Or it could be racism, I mean who knows, I haven't seen it.

I didn't notice the whitewashing, just that the film looked... really bad.

Also, it was making Egyptian mythology boring. That's like making Greek mythology boring.

@tajasaurus: Hey, for every Exodus there's a Kingsman.

You're welcome.

@dudeglove:

Anyway, I'm only doing the visual effects. I have no input over the casting, script, editing, cinematography or anything like that. Dude tells me to make something look shiny, I do the thing. With the computer.

@sweep: Where did you hide the penises?

@combustion_man: Exactly where you'd expect.

@sweep: Huh, a friend of mine worked on VFX for this movie, too. Lives in Sydney, Australia.

It looks absolutely ridiculous in all of the ways that I love ridiculousness...and now that I have this information of Sweep working on it, I'm not surprised in the least bit.

I'll be at the theatre on release day.

As for everyone else's complaints of the whitewashing, eh. I'm not going into this movie expecting something other than cheeseball and insanity, and I'm fine with Leonidas and Lannister being at the helm of it.

You might be the only one.

@liquidprince: I'm perfectly fine with that. More room for me in the theatre, less cell phones. Given the amount of Islamophobia going on in the country at the moment, it's only a matter of time before Fox News or someone starts ripping into it for some random shit and it tanks at the box office.

That doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good cheeseball movie of silliness.

@shaunage: Lead studio was RSP, they're based in Adelaide Australia, so that makes sense.The clients tend to split up the work into different sequences/scenes and then get studios to bid on the work depending on their specialities. It's pretty rare to have huge studios doing a whole film these days. Most places will have a core team and then crew up/down depending on what they need for the film.

@starvinggamer: They actually did cast an Indian actor (Irrfan Khan) for The Martian but there was some scheduling conflict or something. I think I read that over on Birth.Movies.Death (which in my opinion is like the Giant Bomb of movies)

Also it's cool to see stuff like this get more awareness. Master of None is a great show that's also trying to highlight the reason stuff like this might be happening.

And yea, this movie, like 300 and the recent Transformers movies, is probably going to be a guilty pleasure for me (@jakob187 I'll definitely be in that theatre with you!)

Imma say the real problem here is that this looks like big-budgeted flaming garbage. I'm kinda glad I've grown past getting all giggidy from just seeing big explosions happening on the screen. Or wait, I really liked Mad Max. Maybe because that wasn't "Mad Max ventures through the green screen land."

There is Rami Malek of Mr. Robot and Until Dawn fame and that's it.

I'm looking forward to the day we get a new over-used action movie trailer template.

@liquidprince: I see the point you are trying to make, but why not go to Egypt or make Hollywood a more friendly environment for these people? You're starting to see Indians and Pakistanis play actual Indians and Pakistanis. Have it so Arabs aren't just terrorists etc. I'm sure you could find actors but stereocasting is going to happen. Whitewashing makes business sense to studios.

Wow how can this be anything more than Straight to DVD.

Bad Hollywood film makes bad Hollywood choices, more news at 10!

But jokes aside yeah that looks pretty awful.

@sweep: How do you guys manage to stay afloat these days? I hear the pay you guys get is really bad compared to all the work you do

I agree... it's time we moved on from the bass drop... might I make a suggestion for the next over-used trailer sound effect? Omg... someone needs to start taking trailers and replacing all of the over-used bass drops with an air horn!

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: up next: Handel's Messiah via air horns.

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: I heavily approve.

@chocobodude3: The people who say that they should have hired Egyptian actors to play the parts of Rameses or Thutmose, or would suggest black actors for those roles, are either ignorant about Egyptology or are willfully ignoring it.

Just for the start skim through this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy

Schlocky silliness is fine but I'm surprised movies like this still get greenlit. Movies of this style and calibre don't tend to triple their budget like I hear budgets of this size are expected to, and although I understand nobody goes in trying to make a bad picture if its not a known property the script would have to be mind blowing to push this through.

@aeschylus: Egyptology is a goddamn mess and anthropologists often take a stance of 'color blindness' when it comes to the study for obnoxious reasons. The discussions on this topic usually go: "Were they black? Who knows. Were they European whites? Well no probably not. Why did Ramses II seemingly have red hair? Idk but he may have been fair-skinned or he could have had vitiligo. So who were ancient Egyptians? Well they were probably North Africans."

Of course anything I or anyone more qualified than me says, someone can argue against because that's how friggin' Egyptology always is.

It's all a lot of probably's, maybe's, and who knows. It's worse than the whole Clovis-first vs. pre-Clovis debate or anything similar because no one really seems to care at this point and never came to some solid conclusion. Portraying ancient North Africans (and especially their gods???) as European is still annoying, though.

This is coming from someone who has a degree in both History and Anthropology. I could never agree with the color blindness theory and I have so many issues with Anthropology in general.

THAT IS A VERY GOOD QUESTION.

The reality is that most of us don't.

McConaughey actually had some serious(ish) work under his belt before his years in the romcom wilderness. He got a lot of good press for A Time to Kill and I think he's probably the most memorable part of Dazed and Confused. I don't think Gerard Butler can reall say that, although there are one or two bright spots in his career.

Just how generic can a movie get? The only thing 'Egyptian' about this just seems to be the names they give things. Seems like as though everything else could be swapped in and out at will with that Greek mythology movie. Even the title card has nothing going for it. There are two 0's in God's Of Egypt! They could have made one of those The Eye of Ra, or just thrown a little flair somewhere.

They should just make a movie about a guy through a journey in the Egyptian after-life. That'd be rad. And put Del Toro in as the set and costume design.