Fox to Make 300-Style Moses Movie

Both Empire and Variety are reporting that Fox are planning to make a new film about Moses in the style of 2007's 300. The new film will be produced by Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark from Adam Cooper and Bill Collage's script. There's no definite news on who the director will be but the current favourite is Timur Bekmambetov who is working on a similarly styled film version of "Moby Dick".

Here's a little bit more from Variety:

20th Century Fox has made a preemptive acquisition of a pitch to tell the story of Moses in "300" style. The tale will start with his near death as an infant to his adoption into the Egyptian royal family, his defiance of the Pharoah and deliverance of the Hebrews from enslavement.

[snip]

The Moses story will be told using the same green screen strategy as "300," so it will feel more like that pic or "Braveheart" than "The Ten Commandments,” the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille film.

The popular mythical and magical elements inherent in the Book of Exodus will be there--including the plagues visited upon Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea--but the Cooper & Collage version will also include new elements of Moses’ life that the writers culled from Rabbinical Midrash and other historical sources.

That last line is imilar to the kind of thing Cecil B. DeMille said about his second version of The Ten Commandments. In reality, though, his film contained relatively little midrashic material and mainly used modern novelisations of the Moses story.

I'm not sure I'm hugely optimistic about this film. Whilst I appreciated the style of Sin City and 300, I also found both films to be depressingly misogynistic. I'm not sure I'm too keen for a hyper-violent misogynistic take on a patriarchal story, even if it also looks fantastic. But who knows, perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.