What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 1998. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997
“The Prince of Egypt” used to scare me a lot. The story of Moses was always my favorite Sunday school story, but hearing about it in church and seeing it depicted are two different things. I knew Moses killed a man before fleeing Egypt, but seeing the supposed circumstances of that killing? Shocking. That Passover scene? I’m an oldest child, that scene terrified me. The part where God yells at Moses through the burning bush while the music goes nuts? Terror-inducing. And yet, I watched and re-watched this movie dozens of times as a kid. It scared me, but I couldn’t look away.
I think that’s because this movie is better than most other “religious” films about understanding the tone it’s going for. This is a story about the power of God — power in answering prayers, power in restorative justice, power in sheer might. the first act is light, establishing the playful rivalry between Moses and Ramses. (This movie taught me what midrash was, though I didn’t know what the word meant at the time. I love stories that try to fill in the gaps of what we think we know from the Bible vs. what we see in the text.) The second act sets up Moses’ conversion and his requests to Ramses to let his people go.
The last part of the second act and all of the third act feature some terror-including imagery if you haven’t heard of it before. Blood in the water. Boils on peoples’ faces. A spirit that will kill your oldest son if you didn’t mark your house with blood.
And this is a kid’s movie, adapted from a story that’s mostly sanitized to be told in Sunday school classes. But it’s all done just scarily enough that it produces a feeling of awe in the viewer, both in the subject matter and how it’s animated; my jaw still goes slack when I see the whale in the reflection in the water when the Israelites are crossing the Red Sea, and I’m still amazed when I see the hieroglyphic nightmare scene. You’re scared, but you’re not afraid of it; you fear it.
That’s what I love about this movie: it can still produce a feeling of awe within me, decades later.
Up next: 1999 was a huge year for movies and had a lot of options to choose from, but I decided to continue the animation trend and go with “The Iron Giant.”
Letter of Recommendation
The soundtrack for this movie is also fantastic. Check out Whitney and Mariah:
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