Okay here's a general rule I find when it comes to making romanticised movies about Saints or other religious characters.
Try to really play up the spiritualism (and for that matter intense, internal personal monologues.) Create the long-winded speeches and soliloquies revolving around various characters and their understanding of the faith.
Really pump in some of that Theologian philosophy.
To me it's a matter of 'Go Big or know how to make an interesting movie'.
Sometimes you'll get lucky and you can do both like ''The Last Temptation of Christ'' or that 'Ten Commandments' movie.
But otherwise it's best to just bury yourself in the religious language of your character. Otherwise you run the frets of trying to create sincere and interesting religious people but have the whole thing Falls shorts because you have some cheesy monologues or badly placed wacky music beside incredibly cheap looking sets.
If I haven't gotten the point across yet I think this movie needs a lot of work.
It's supposed to be a slightly dramatised version of the life of Moses the Ethiopian.
But the whole thing is cheaply made and I feel as if it loses sight of its intended purpose from time to time.
I think they should have cut the time of this down to about an hour and 20 and just keeping us a direct man of the criminal World becomes the Saints via the power of the Christian faith.
Just have the whole thing revolving around him having conversations with other Church fathers and man of the cloth.
But instead we also get these various scenes of Moses interacting with his old gang and other people that he formally either worked with or live with.
In a lot of ways converting them over to Christianity once he endows them with the knowledge of the Holy Spirit.
And that might make for an interesting movie if it was played off better.
But it has this corny music to it and the whole thing just feels incredibly silly as you see these people that have absolutely no interest and in some cases no knowledge of Jesus* all of a sudden converting to the face with a mere one-off conversation with Moses.
That might work in a more spectacular film but we're supposed to believe that this movie is slightly grounded in reality, even though there's a weird scene where it implies that there might be demons and angels in the sky fighting for the thoughts and minds of men.
I don't know this movie doesn't entirely no one wants to be. It wants that over the top spiritual angle but neither has the budget lower the willpower to really push into that angle.
So instead we just got to cut bunch of people implying some form of spiritual power. Which might be closer to how it is in real life as you can't really prove a miracle.
In a way I think the film could have benefited from a more in-depth look at Moses and his criminal life.
We spend a surprisingly little amount of time with him joining a gang of Bandits and leading them around the desert committing crimes.
In fact I think they could have been a fantastic movie made here in where we see one half of the film is Moses committing the most atrocious of crimes as he steals, assaults and kills his way through swaps of North African territory (I would presume mainly the Delta of Egypt.) Only to come across a group of religious people who convinced him of a better life and then focusing on a movie where his internal struggles of his past conflict with his now more religiously orientated mind.
Maybe I'm just ranting on a little too much. I just think that there is decent idea in this film.
That just wasn't really achieved.
Given any problems I have with this film it's still league's better than any of those American Christian movies.
I don't know what it is but you just can't do modern contemporary stories about Christian Living especially from an American perspective where everything has a country twang to it. With those awful awful American Protestant ideas and values.
The whole thing just feel super disconnected from the faith that it's supposed to be associated with. Like looking for a nice glass of Persian Doogh and then stumbling upon a slightly warm crappy Coca-Cola.
There's a good film in this story somewhere. I just don't think this film was able to pull it off.
Like I said it's biggest issue is time. Cut it down a bit and it might be livable it may be cut out some of the cheesy music as well. I get that that's half the actual music that a lot of people listen to now in the Coptic faith. But it just goes back to the problem of modernising Christianity and you end up sounding kind of American all over again.
*So like many other Christian Centric films this movie likes to do the old; ''oh who is this Jesus fellow you speak of? I have never heard of such a man.''
But luckily in this regard that almost works. It's a third century and it's very possible that a lot of people are still unfamiliar with the man. Especially if you're something about low-grade Thug roaming around from one place to the next.
I still think it's unlikely given that it's Alexandria. One of the most prominent cities in the world and a major hub for what was already becoming the prettiest established Christian faith. But like I said it's a cliche of Christian films they love to use it.
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