Today marks the premiere of what’s sure to go down as one of
the most notorious flops of 2016: Gods of
Egypt. There are a lot of
reasons Gods of Egypt is more or less
destined to fail, not the least of which is the horrendous white washing that
informs so much of the films representation of the ancient Egyptians. However, the mysticism of Ancient Egypt
has always had a hard time working its way into the popular consciousness. The most any of us know about the faith
of Egypt tends to come from the cavalcade of Mummy movies produced by Universal
and Hammer films, hence why Anubis is the most well known Egyptian deity.
Egyptian myth is funny that way, the deities are all
instantly recognizable and unique but beyond visual recognition their
particular brand of aesthetics just doesn’t capture the imagination. My theory is that it’s because the
mythic Egyptian oeuvre has already been colonized by a far more dominant
informing genre than fantasy adventure: science fiction and as evidence I
submit Batman: Book of the Dead, in
which Batman proves the gods of Egypt came from space.
