THE PRINCE OF EGYPT A film by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells With the voices of Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helen Mirren, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Patrick Stewart
THE PRINCE OF EGYPT, the long-awaited foray by Dreamworks Animation (and its head, Jeffrey Katzenberg), is an ambitious, enthralling epic whose faults don't undermine the power of the film. Despite its mediocre songs and its rushed story, THE PRINCE OF EGYPT has much to recommend, and is an overpowering addition to the animated genre.
The story is relatively simple. During the Egyptians' killing of all newborn children, a young child is sent down a river, in hopes that he will find a home that will care for him. The young child grows into a man, Moses (Kilmer), and together with his brother Ramses (Ralph Fiennes), is quite a palace troublemaker, until lhe sees two people who remind him of his past. From that moment, Moses leaves the palace, and goes to find his true self. On the way to that, he finds a little more than that: a burning bush, and the voice of God himself. Moses is given a mission: to free the Hebrew slaves from the grasp of the Egyptians.
The story is developed rather a little too quickly. This film, more than any other, deserved the full movie treatment of animation. I found myself asking why didn't Jeffrey Katzenberg take animation to the next level by making his movie 2 hours long? It would have been a better, more complete story. Instead, the miracles of God are rushed into a compact 20 minutes. I found myself looking at my watch midway through, wondering when the Red Sea was ever going to be parted. The first half is quite good. The chariot race sequence between Ramses and Moses is excellent, and the animation throughout the entire movie is top-notch. It is certainly a gorgeous movie to look at.
The voices are superb, but the only two that register are the two that matter. Kilmer and Fiennes are great, as are Goldblum, Bullock, and Pfeiffer. The relationship between Kilmer and Fiennes is essential, however. It has to work for the film to work, and the development is exquisite. The film adds the guilt on Moses as Ramses' son dies. Moses knows he had to go through his ordeals, but he sees his brother suffer, and it is difficult to watch. It is a great moment in animation. There are in fact many of those moments, the best probably being the burning bush, which is a great piece of work.
The score is actually pretty good, although the songs are pretty mediocre. The first song, "Deliver Us",wasn't too bad, and neither was the second, "River Flow Gently". Much of the latter half of the film, beginning with Moses' departure from Egypt, is told in episodic fashion, like Martin Scorsese's KUNDUN, in the sense that songs are merely episodes, and the movie moves from episode to episode, in almost blocks of 5 minutes, telling the story by visuals instead of dialogue. It works for the most part, although some of the songs don't. The big number by Martin and Short is a failure, mostly because it feels like something out of ALADDIN. The song sung by Danny Glover's character, and Moses' future father-in-law is also something that didn't exactly sit well with me, although the sequence was very well done. Come the last, rushed third of the film, there are merely glimpses of things I wanted to see more. All of God's plagues are told in one 4 minute sequence, the plague of the frogs and locusts. These were truly frightening and scary. Yet, it felt rushed. I wanted more of this, I wanted more of this terror, because that was what God was inflicting upon the Egyptians, and Pharoah himself. Certainly, visual wise they were exquisite, but if more had been available, the film would have been even more devastating as far as impact.
Certainly, the Red Sea sequence, the Burning Bush, and the sequence where God takees all of the Egyptian first born, are all spectacular. There is some true uneasiness when God kills so many. There is a strange dichotomy during all of PRINCE OF EGYPT. On one hand, the film wants to extend the borders of animation. It wants to be so great, that it often is. The terrorizing sequences attest to that fact. The character development between Ramses and Moses (the only two characters that are developed) is sensational, and the effects are magnificent. This is meant to be a very serious movie, and it delivers at the end. But throughout the film, there is a sense of making this one "for the kids". As a result, things like Martin Short's and Steve Martin's characters, their ridiculous production number, some of the songs, and MIchelle Pfeiffer's character (who looks a little too much like Disney's POCAHONTAS), are really annoying, and angered me deeply. If Dreamworks had stuck to its guns instead of competing with Disney, they could have made the greatest animated film of all time. Add about 1/2 hour to an hour to it, show what happens to the Hebrews with the Ten Commandments, and take out about half the songs, and this is one hell of a movie. Still, the mature last half, and the spectacular last 20 minutes make this a damn good film. Dreamworks could have done more, but what they did was pretty good itself.
Rating: *** out of ****
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