Exodus Movie “Edited” For North African Release

Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings movie (the one where Batman and Uncle Owen fight over the freedom of the Israelites) was prohibited from release in several North African countries. Not because of the quality of the film (I can only dream of a day when movies are not allowed to be released because they are terrible). But for several reasons, including historical inaccuracies and depicting God in human form.

Now it looks like movie fans in North Africa might have the chance to be disappointed by this film, just like I was.

The Wrap reports that changes have been made to the film to make the depiction of God more palatable to the North African movie going public. Apparently dialogue has been removed that implied that God was personified as a human. The report states that the distributor has not confirmed this news.

I’m actually kind of interested in seeing this edited cut of the film. God being depicted as a petulant 8 year old boy who may or may not be a product of Moses’ brain damage was perhaps my least favourite thing about Exodus: Gods and Kings. I’m curious if these edits would change my opinion. Removing dialogue would hopefully also reduce the run time of this plodding beast of a film.

Interesting note: when looking through the production stills and press release photos from the movie, I couldn’t find a single image of Exodus’ God character. Is this something that the studio wanted to save as a surprise, or did they know it was going to be controversial?