How Much Exodus is Too Much Exodus? The Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments

Minimalism, maximalism, and its discontents

Photo by Robert Tavalbi on Unsplash

How do you make a movie of the book of Exodus? Do you keep it simple, or do you expand it? Do you keep the drama local and interpersonal, or do you stage it as grand and epic? Do you adapt only a part of the story, or the whole book? 

Over Christmas, as one does, I recently sat down to watch two of Exodus’s best-loved adaptations (the less said of Ridley Scott’s, the better). These are The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Simon Wells, and Steve Hickner, 1998), and The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956). And they answer these questions in the exact opposite ways. There’s a lot to be said about both of these movies, and Bible epics in general. But these two movies are particularly interesting to me because of their nearly-diametrically-opposed approaches to the process of taking on Exodus. The Prince of Egypt is (despite adding the significant element of making it a non-diegetic musical) an incredibly lean, interpersonal take on the story that treats the Exodus as part character study, part family drama. It has a clear protagonist, a few key supporting roles, and a lot of subtext. Most of the movie is subtext. The lines are sparse and the visuals and music do most of the talking. 

The Ten Commandments is… well, it’s not that. We’ll get to The Ten Commandments in a bit. 

For all its budget, extras, and runtime, The Ten Commandments actually doesn’t tell the story nearly as well as its animated, for-kids counterpart. And this actually might be a function of genre. The Prince of Egypt has to hold the attention of eight-year-old, so it needs big characters, obvious motivations, and clearly drawn characters. And it can’t take more than an hour-forty-five to do it. The Prince of Egypt has to do a little with a lot. By contrast, by virtue of being an old Hollywood epic, The Ten Commandments can have as many characters and subplots as it wants – and boy does it! But ultimately, this lack of discipline, I’d argue, means it actually does a little with a lot. 

Here, I’ll show you. 

Minimum Exodus: The Prince of Egypt 

The Prince of Egypt is one of the most efficient scripts ever written, going from Exodus chapters 1-15 in a crisp ninety-nine minutes. The movie ruthlessly axes characters from Exodus – we have no Joshua, none of Moses’ sons, not even Pharoah’s sister. Eight plagues appear in one song. The death of the firstborn takes three wordless, harrowing minutes. There are hardly any extraneous plot points – the only major extension, Ramses’ promotion and the gift of the captive Tzipporah, pays off beautifully by introducing us to Moses’s future wife and by setting in motion the events that lead to Moses killing the Egyptian. This is Exodus cut to the bone, but the subtext makes the movie feel much more expansive than it is. 

For instance, let’s look at the minor role of Sethi. Sethi is a solemn, imperious figure who appears for the first time after Moses goads his brother into a stupid stunt that destroys a construction project. Sethi places all the blame for the incident on Ramses, despite Moses’s protest. Sethi explains this to Moses by telling him he must be much harder on Ramses – Ramses will one day bear the heavy weight of the crown, and “one weak link can bring down the chain of a mighty dynasty.” Ramses takes this to heart, and is despondent that his father is so hard on him. Later, we learn more about Sethi’s style of rule when Moses realizes Sethi was the one who commanded the slaughter of the Hebrew babies, which Moses escaped due to a clever mother and the whims of fate. When Moses asks his parents to explain himself, his mother reveals that she has more or less compartmentalized this – the gods gave her Moses, so that was why he was spared. Sethi, likewise, makes a distinction between his son and the children who didn’t escape – Moses is his son, but the rest were “only slaves.” Sethi explains this was a terrible act he needed to do to keep the dynasty running. 

Remember Sethi pointing, this is imagery the movie wants you to remember.

This scene is the last time we see Sethi himself. But Sethi’s willingness to do horrible things and absolve himself of the consequences shows up repeatedly in the character of his son Ramses. Ramses literally mirrors his father when he poses alongside a statue that suggests his face when he defends slavery, and when he announces his attention to do another cull of the slave population he mirrors a painting of Sethi on the wall doing the same thing. Ramses and Sethi are ultimately cut from the same cloth – sometimes a king must do horrible things to maintain his kingdom. Ramses is further pushed by the insecurity he got at the hands of his father – he repeatedly justifies his worst actions by saying he won’t be “the weak link.” Despite his short screen presence, Sethi does heavy thematic lifting in the movie, serving as the face of the banality of evil: cruel, utilitarian state decisions, authoritarian and hurtful parenting.

“Doing a lot with a little” is ultimately what Prince of Egypt excels at, and most of the movie lives in subtext. For example, Moses’s character development from spoiled, carefree youngest son to courageous leader seems to be set in motion in part by his adoptive mother. The queen shows some signs of being able to feel compassion for the less fortunate, but it’s limited. She’s able to feel grief at cruelty when it has a particular face (the last Hebrew baby in a basket, her sons getting yelled at, Tzipporah humiliated before the court) but she has no ability to translate these into compassion for the human masses that make her life possible. This is similar to how Moses goes through the world – he feels guilt about his treatment of Tzipporah when he sees the court laughing at her (and particularly, his mother’s disappointment with him), but he ultimately takes steps his adoptive mother is never able to. While his adoptive parents can and do make an arbitrary distinction between Moses and the rest of the Hebrews (one is their precious gift from the gods, the rest are chattel), Moses can’t. He’s able to see the falsehoods of this distinction and grow in a way his mother can’t. Moses sees that he’s actually not different from the rest of the Hebrews. He sees that if it’s wrong to humiliate Tzipporah in front of the court, it’s wrong to keep her as property at all. We can see from his mom where Moses got these ideas, but ultimately Moses follows them to their logical conclusion. This is all very subtly done, and very little of it is text. 

Maximum Exodus: The Ten Commandments 

The Ten Commandments adds characters where The Prince of Egypt removes them, expands plotlines instead of shrinking them, and flattens characters that Prince of Egypt layers. You would think the chief benefit of a four-hour Exodus with many additional subplots would be to deepen characters and enrich themes. But that’s not what happens. 

Let’s do some compare and contrast of the characters we discussed above:

How did Sethi deal with Bithia bringing home a baby? In The Prince of Egypt, Sethi knew the whole time where Moses came from and took pleasure in his feisty second son. He and his wife largely blocked out the ugly truth of how Moses came to live with them, even though they both knew and just kept it a secret from their kids. When the kids grew up, they had to deal with explaining it to their son, but their poor justifications never satisfied him. In The Ten Commandments, Sethi apparently never thought about it (“Bithia’s got a new baby, huh!”) and only realized decades later when someone literally explained it to him.

Why is Ramses so opposed to Moses? In The Prince of Egypt, it’s a late stage development. Ramses is thrilled to see Moses return, and only turns on Moses when Moses takes the step of criticizing Sethi and ultimately rejecting his association with their family – giving back the ring Ramses gave them when they were kids. Ramses is deeply betrayed and hurt, and his sense of being turned on only escalates as the plagues develop. In Prince of Egypt, Ramses just hates Moses because Moses is popular with Pharoah and Ramses wants the throne for himself. This is in spite of the fact that Moses doesn’t seem like he actually wants the throne, just to do a good job and maybe have sex with Nefretiri. 

Ramses does have this kicky little two-tone dress from The Limited he looks great in.

Why is Ramses so eager to hang onto power? In The Prince of Egypt, Ramses’ megalomania is a thin cover for his barely-concealed self-hatred he got from his dad. His grand pronouncements about who he is (“I am the morning and evening star”) often come associated with his denial of what his father said about him (“I will not be the weak link”). Ramses needs to believe he’s strong because his entire life he’s been told he’s not, and disaster will strike if he ever reveals the truth – that he actually is pathetic, that he did disappoint his family, and that Moses actually was the favored son simply because Moses never had to impress his parents. The possibility of losing to, of all people, the favorite, indulged brother who often caused his father’s disapproval and then betrayed him is more than he can stand. In The Ten Commandments, he’s just eager for power and we don’t really know why.

The funny thing is, all the answers in Prince of Egypt seem like they would take a lot longer to set up. They don’t. The Ten Commandments is three times as long and much, much shallower about the core relationships, to the point that it verges on nonsense. 

For instance, let’s talk about Sethi. In The Prince of Egypt, Sethi’s explanation for why he killed the children is cruel and utilitarian. He did it because the slaves were too numerous. He killed a generation of their sons to prevent an uprising, and it worked. Sethi justifies this based on the results and the valueness of the slaves – they have plenty. Sethi is a reasonable face on fathomless evil. This is the side of Sethi Moses, and the audience, ultimately remembers – Moses decries “what he really was” to a Ramses who won’t listen.

In The Ten Commandments, Sethi’s father Ramses I enacts the slaughter, and the motivations for his singular greatest evil are totally different – astrologers tell him that a baby has been born who will defeat Egypt. The Hebrews prophesy it will lead them out of Egypt. Why the pharaohs believes the Hebrew prophecy is not clear – they’re not Hebrews, after all, and in fact multiple advisors tell Ramses I to leave the slaves alone, since large numbers of slaves are good for large numbers of buildings. Ramses I decides to kill all the newborns. Then twenty years later, the Egyptians are struggling with running out of slaves (Moses raids the granaries to keep them from getting sick), and Ramses’ heir Sethi still looking for the deliverer, which he still apparently believes is out there somewhere, because the Hebrews are talking about him. This all seems chaotic and uneven, and Sethi’s continued belief in the deliverer seems bizarre. And that’s fine, if Sethi is staged as a paranoid nutcase. But he’s not. Instead the scriptwriters decide to make Sethi the foil to the cruel Ramses, supporting Moses in his more humane approach to the slaves and favoring heroic Moses over sinister Ramses. Moses remains devoted to Sethi his whole life, including when he is banished. Sethi finally does the same, expressing grief for banishing him and revealing his love for Moses. But neither of them ever grapple with the fact that Sethi’s father ordered this massacre that has decimated their wealth and failed to prevent an uprising. The massacred Hebrew children are never brought up again. 

What is this characterization? Sethi comes across as incurious, flat, and more than a little superstitious. There’s also just a whole different pharaoh in the story — Ramses I — muddying the waters and making Sethi’s character further undeveloped. All we really know about him is that he’s not as bad as either Ramses, and that he’s hung up on a legend told by his own slaves. So why is he staged as so reasonable and moral compared to Ramses? Why is Moses so devoted to this guy? In The Prince of Egypt, Sethi lays an egg of catastrophe that Ramses finally hatches. In The Ten Commandments, he does… what, exactly? It seems like the scriptwriters never land on anything, and miss the opportunity that Prince of Egypt seized on. 

Most of the characters have broadly drawn, simplistic desires. Ramses wants power. Nefretiri (Moses’s love interest in the first half) wants Moses. Moses wants Pharaoh to let his people go, at least in the second act. But most of the character interactions and conflicting goals are stated rather than explored. For instance, Tzipporah tells Nefretiri that Moses is no longer attached to her now that he’s found God, but we’ve never seen him act cold to her and he actually defends her against Nefretiri’s jabs. Lila (another character created for the movie – Joshua’s erstwhile girlfriend who becomes the concubine of Goshen’s governor to prevent Joshua’s murder) says she is an outcast among the people for her decision, but we never see any fallout from this. Plot threads emerge and then vanish – Nefretiri kills a servant to protect Moses’s Hebrew identity from getting out; it does anyway and Moses never grapples with the fact that the woman he loves killed a woman for him. Moses’s wife leaves him at least partially owing to bitterness about his disinterest in her, but then she’s in the last scene offering to die with him. There’s a lot more movie, but there’s a lot less meaning. 

In place of the characters and the script introducing the themes, The Ten Commandments makes up the shortfall by just adding a narrator. We’re told, through an introduction at the beginning and portentous narration throughout, that this story is about freedom. Are people supposed to live under the whims of a tyrant, or are they supposed to be free? The narrator chimes in repeatedly to remind us this is the theme. But the visual language of the film can’t get us there on its own. We’re told a lot that the slaves live degrading lives of backbreaking work. But because this is all on a soundstage, the long sequences of slaves doing work just don’t look that backbreaking. No one ever looks particularly hot or tired. No one is emaciated. Joshua looks fit and made up.

The work usually looks more boring than hard.

Compare with with the yellow shots and pounding music and emaciated figures in The Prince of Egypt’s opening number, “Deliver Us.” Isn’t this actually much more brutal?

I think there’s ultimately a lesson in all this for writers. Sometimes constraints – particularly involving length – actually matter. They force us to maximalize impact and minimize throat clearing. If you make visual media, there’s another lesson here – what’s heard through a narrator ultimately doesn’t land as hard as what we see. If you make the visuals do the work for you – Ramses’s finger against the wall, following in his father’s footsteps – do you really need dialogue to explain what’s happening? Let alone a narrator? Isn’t this better? 

If you enjoy The Ten Commandments, I will never discourage you from this. The movie is fun to watch for its old Hollywood glamor, incredible excess, wild effects, and the over-the-top performances. (And where was Anne Baxter’s Oscar nomination?!) But ultimately, I think The Prince of Egypt – for all its visually astonishing scenes – had the right idea not to make it an epic. It made the story a drama. And the story ultimately, in this form, carries more meaning than its epic forerunner. And isn’t this what it’s all about?