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Amphibians in Movies |
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Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) |
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Spoiler Alert !
Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
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This is director Ridley Scott's version of the biblical story of Moses and Ramses, and the ten plagues that convinced Ramses to let the Hebrew slaves leave Egypt. Christian Bale is Moses and Joel Edgerton is Ramses. It has a really over-the-top bloody scene with crocodiles that kicks off the plagues of Egypt section of the film, and there's an extended sequence with thousands of frogs during the frog plague. There's also a non-violent scene with snakes that isn't part of the plagues.
The film tries to explain some of the more supernatural aspects of the bible story. A burning bush doesn't speak to Moses, as it does in the Charlton Heston classic, an angel in the form of a young boy speaks to him. In this film Moses doesn't have a magic snake staff that can turn into a snake, he has a sword. It doesn't transform into anything, but it does appear to have some magic powers. After Moses throws his sword into the sea, the water all flows away, as if it's some kind of tidal flow. Later it comes roaring back like a Tsunami. The Egyptians also try to explain the plagues in a scientific manner.
In case you've forgotten, these are the ten plagues: water turning into blood, frogs, gnats or lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the killing of firstborn children. The first few plagues are explained to the Pharaoh by one of his experts who tells him: "The Nile, as we know, carries a certain amount of clay. This year there's much more of it than usual, drifting in on the currents, settling on the riverbeds, and kicked up by the wild thrashing of the crocodiles. This thrashing not only dramatically changed the color of the water, but it fouled it to the point of killing the fish. But frogs, as we know, can get out of the water, when they have to. Which they did. But frogs still need water, and when they can't find it in the streets of our city. They what? Hmm? They die! And then they decompose. And then the gnats come and the maggots come and the flies come." (What he doesn't explain is why so many of the frogs ended up in the city. The river is hundreds of miles long so they should have been spread out a lot more.)
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The Frogs Scene
We see the Nile full of blood after the crocodiles thrashed around and killed a lot of people. The bloody water is also full of dead fish. Then we see lots of frogs coming out of the water, including one with a ridiculously long thin tongue that it shoots at a human hand, for no understandable reason. We see thousands of frogs climbing out of the river and through the streets of the city. We haven't seen this many frogs on screen since Magnolia.
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Then we see frogs crawling all over the bedroom and the bed of Ramses' wife Nefertari (Golshifteh Farahani). She wakes up in horror when she sees the frogs and screams for Ramses to do something about them, but he tells her to chill out: "They're just frogs." Then the frogs all die. We see piles of dead frogs covered with worms lying around the city and piles of them around the city and piles of burning frogs. Then the plague of flies come and we see Ramses' advisor explaining what has happened.
I don't think the frogs are all CGI. There are probably some real frogs in the mix. It's hard to tell, even in the scenes that aren't dark and murky to hide the computer animation. |
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