Gods of Egypt is like Beast Wars crossed with bad Internet porn

By now you’ve heard rumors or seen the reviews, so you know that Gods of Egypt, out this weekend, is quite possibly the most terrible movie ever made. There’s a lot of competition for that dubious honor, so let’s just say it’s ONE of the most terrible. And that’s what makes it so damn fascinating.

On its surface, Gods of Egypt sounds like the premise of a cheesy 1990s fantasy game—or a 1950s B-movie. A young thief named Bek is trying to get by on the skill of his dextrous fingers in Egyptian Mythical Times (sort of like where Xena Warrior Princess is set, except in Egypt). All he wants to do is marry a cute girl but then she’s killed by a bad guy, so Bek decides to rescue her from the underworld. Activate dramatic arc involving an intensely uncharismatic hero and his thrilling ability to do things like jump around and grab stuff (yep his range of abilities is pretty much defined by what you can do with the arrows on a keyboard).

But wait, there's more. Bek is actually a minor player in a war between the Egyptian gods. Bad guy Set (played with bewildering lower lip acting by Gerard Butler) rips out his nephew Horus’ eyes (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, aka Jaime Lannister) and takes over Egypt, all to impress his emotionally withholding father Ra (Geoffrey Rush in full OMG WTF mode). A few other gods are thrown in, like Hathor (Elodie Yung, who embodies love by being a hot mess) and Thoth (Chadwick Boseman, who steals the show by turning the god of wisdom into an OCD nerd). So there’s your second dramatic arc: Horus has to get his eyes back with the help of his zany band of gods—and learn A Very Special Lesson from Bek along the way.

All this sounds like your standard issue sword-and-sandal flick, sort of like The 300 with less slo-mo and more seriously ridiculous CGI. So what makes Gods of Egypt so exquisitely horrible?

Bad choices

First of all, the answer is not “the decline of Hollywood.” Hollywood is the source of many ideas both terrible and amazing, and it is no surprise that somehow rich producers once again spent millions of dollars on narrative garbage. Mind-boggling awfulness is one of Hollywood’s signature styles, so suck it up.

Last weekend, John Oliver made Gods of Egypt the poster child for the “whitewashing” trend in Hollywood, where white actors play people of color with really awkward results (the studio and director have since apologized for this film's lack of diversity). But whitewashing is just the tip of the terribleness iceberg here. The stories told in this movie are so far removed from anything vaguely related to stories told in ancient Egypt that Horus and Set might as well be orcs. This is the Dungeons and Dragons version of African history.

Or maybe it's the Michael Bay version of history because this movie turns all the gods into Transformers who can switch between human form and ridiculous CGI armor with animal heads. If you ever watched Transformers: Beast Wars in the 1990s, it’s kind of like that. There's also the fact that the gods are all twice the size of humans, which makes every scene with Horus and Bek look utterly ridiculous.

You truly haven’t experienced WTFery until you’ve watched scantily-clad human women the size of Horus’ legs trying to wash him in a bubble bath. It does not make Horus look magnificent. It makes him look like the victim of Internet gigantism fetishists who own pirated copies of Photoshop.

Occupy the afterlife

The big moral struggle at the heart of the movie—not to get grandiose here—is whether the gods will allow poor people into the afterlife. When Set takes over, he decrees that only rich people will get an afterlife, but Horus’ father Osiris is OK with letting poor people in too. It’s as if somebody randomly decided to inject Occupy politics into the story to make it "relevant."

We’ve also got anachronistic Christian concepts like humility and forgiveness in Gods of Egypt. That’s right—Horus has to learn humility among the 99 percent before he can go full god again. But no self-respecting Egyptian god of Horus’ stature would ever have needed to learn humility. That was just not a thing.

I haven’t even gotten started on the more basic failures of this film, like the way director Alex Proyas will randomly jump from one scene to the other with no explanation. First we’re in a treasure maze! Then we’re on a space boat throwing negs at cosmic monsters! Somebody is making maps! People are racing horses! Proyas is known for cult classics like The Crow and Dark City, but also for stinkers like I, Robot and Knowing. He’s definitely in full stink mode with Gods of Egypt.

Characters do things with almost no motivation at all. Why does Set build a bunch of giant towers and then decide to destroy them with a space worm? Because he’s… remaking the world to get back at Ra or something? Why does Bek’s girlfriend think Horus is so great, when all he’s ever done is take bubble baths with slave girls while his dad Osiris ruled Egypt? Um … because the plot needs Bek to help Horus?

Biblical epic fail

Gods of Egypt is obviously an attempt to make another movie in the mold of Exodus and Noah, modern, amped-up Biblical-style epics which harken back to mid-century classics like The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra. In fact, Gods of Egypt is exactly the kind of movie that the Coen Brothers are making fun of in their recent comedy about 1950s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar!

It’s weird to have Hail, Caesar! in theaters right alongside Gods of Egypt, the former testifying to how long failures like the latter have existed. Despite Hollywood’s obsession with reboots and remakes, it seems as if the Biblical epic is one genre that just can’t change. It’s still whitewashed, still cheesy, and still hopelessly out of touch with actual history. I suppose the gritty Gladiator might be the closest thing to an actual reboot that the genre had in recent memory, but that movie has no gods nor aspirations to mythological swashbuckling.

What ultimately makes Gods of Egypt such an off-the-charts bomb is that it tries to shoehorn Egyptian history and myth into the Biblical epic formula. This was a mistake that Exodus made too, but Exodus was telling the Judeo-Christian side of the story—so the mythos part was relatively accurate, at least. In Gods of Egypt, the mythos gets horribly flubbed and so does the history. So you’re left with a clueless, incoherent tale that makes Beast Wars look nuanced.

But at least Beast Wars wasn’t an effort to retell stories from one of the most spectacular and long-lived mythologies in history. It was just Cheetor and pals doing their thing on whatever that planet was. Gods of Egypt had a chance to be a lot more.

Of course it's possible that Gods of Egypt will achieve special cult status in film history, much like Battlefield Earth or Plan 9 From Outer Space. Those flicks are so bad they've become legendary, and that might be the kind of lasting infamy Gods of Egypt deserves.