4,0 av 5 stjärnor
A Complex, but Dynamic Plot That Never Flags
Recenserad i USA 🇺🇸 den 6 januari 2016
The life of Tutankhamun, shadowy successor to the heretic-Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, has fascinated students of ancient history since Howard Carter's dramatic discovery of a hidden tomb. Now, thanks to Spike, that life has come to the small screen as a lavishly produced miniseries.
Because Tut's life was shadowy, the miniseries' writers and producers had to fill in blanks with real and invented characters in situations that likely happened, may have happened, or could never have happened as shown, but are entertaining. The result of characters in conflict is a complex, but dynamic plot that never flags.
The directors assembled a cast that is serviceable at its weakest and stellar at its strongest. Headlining the cast even above Tut is Sir Ben Kingsley in the role of the scheming vizier Ay. Fans of the Bible Collection will recall Ben Kingsley’s memorable performances as Potiphar and Moses. His turn as Ay is no less memorable. Ben Kingsley can do more with a twitch of an eyebrow than most actors can do with a page of script. His classical restraint makes his rare outbursts more powerful than they would otherwise be.
Next, cast in the role of Tut is a teen actor, Avan Jogia, who holds his own beside Sir Ben Kingsley with a performance of brooding intensity punctuated by emotions ranging from light humor to killing rage. If Tut is a sign of the future, Avan Jogia can foresee a long career as a leading man.
The Australian actor Sibylla Deen in the role of Tut's sister-wife Ankhesenamun is problematic, at times dazzling and at other times annoying. She can hold her own with the leading actors, but has a strong tendency to over-enunciate her words and overdo her facial expressions to the point that they detract from the action. She's at her best in scenes of trauma and mourning, which were likely, sad to say, as common in the real Ankhesenamun's life as in the miniseries.
As a long-time fan of Star Trek, I enjoyed seeing Alexander Siddig, formerly Siddig el-Fadil, in the invented role of High Priest Amun. (The name Amun is invented; the position of high priest is not.) Alexander Siddig brought an amazing expressiveness, both verbally and physically, to his role. At times, his action veered into excess, but, in a production on the scale of Tut, excess is hardly a vice.
Kylie Bunbury was excellent in the invented role of Suhat, Tut's true love interest: a woman, half of enemy blood, who saves him from death and becomes first a secondary wife in his harem and then a player for supreme power. Kylie Bunbury brought a broad range of genuine emotion to her role, which illustrates the vagaries of love, childbearing, and scheming for influence and succession in a polygamous royal court.
Peter Galiot, in the invented role of Lagus, a soldier who rises to become Tut's right-hand man, was good in acting, but jarring in appearance. His bearded, blue-eyed looks in a cast otherwise mostly convincing as Ancient Egyptians would have worked if he could have been passed off as a Greek mercenary who had risen to influence in the Egyptian army, but no Greek mercenaries had made it as far as Thebes in the Eighteenth Dynasty. I will discuss another problem, not with the acting, but with the writing, of his role later.
Iddo Goldberg in the invented role of Ka, a friend to Tut and a no-so-secret lover to Ankesenamun, was the weakest member of the main cast. Coming across to me as youthful and inexperienced beside the rest of the cast, he could have been the trusted, yet treacherous friend of any teen drama. Let me mention here a minor cavil about the miniseries: the Ancient Egyptians may well have made up nicknames for such a mouth-filling name as Ankhesenamun, but the way that Ka called her "Ankhe" came across to me as just silly.
I welcomed seeing Nonso Anozie, who had given a striking performance as Samson in Mark Burnet and Roma Downey's The Bible, in the role of General Horemheb. The actor brought an imposing calm to Horemheb in repose and a riveting intensity to the character to moments of conflict, which were continual in the miniseries. I doubt that I am giving too much away when I say that, late in the production, he gets to be Samson again.
Of the miniseries’ minor characters, Nakht, Ay’s son, was impressive, mostly sullen, but sometimes charming. Nakht-Min was a real person, in line to succeed Ay when he took the throne, but he somehow disappears from history before Horemheb came to power.
Recently, casting in Middle Eastern historic epics has evoked an ongoing controversy. Some have correctly pointed out that blue-eyed, fair-skinned Europeans and Americans look nothing like Ancient Egyptians. With the exception of the actor playing Lagus, Tut's directors have avoided actors fitting this description. Modern Egyptians, who feel a special connection to Ancient Egypt, tend to argue that an Ancient Egyptian epic should feature Egyptian actors. In Tut, the closest approach to an Egyptian actor is the Anglo-Sudanese Alexander Siddig. Tut's directors followed a middle course by assembling an international, multiracial cast headlined by a pair of Anglo-Indians. Perhaps, the cast makes the statement that Ancient Egypt is humanity’s common heritage.
The miniseries' strong performances are due in large part to strong direction. This shows especially in a number of amazing scenes in which the actors carry the action and conflict by expressions and body language alone. It takes both strong actors and a strong director to pull off such scenes, but they're a treat when they work, as they work in Tut.
The miniseries' main actors play against the background of the proverbial "cast of thousands," each of them lovingly arrayed in authentic Ancient Egyptian attire. The cast moves through lavish, finely detailed, brilliantly colored sets with the look and feel of Ancient Egypt restored to life. The sets in turn give way to the awesome desolation of the Moroccan desert, a character in itself.
Cast, clothing, and setting are served by strong writing that centers on court intrigue, some of which had to have actually happened. The childless, inexperienced Tut strives to gain and hold on to power amid the maneuverings of Ay and Horemheb, both with an eye on succeeding Tut should he fail or die. Ankhesenamun, unable to bear a living heir, fights to hold on to her position as Chief Royal Wife against an outsider who might bear a royal heir. The high priest schemes to gain power for himself...
Sadly, the conflict involving the high priest loses by the director's decision to deal only cursorily with the religious conflict in Egypt before and during Tutankamun's reign. We get no clear sense that Tut's father, Akhenaten, had replaced the worship of the Egyptian pantheon with one god, the Aten, and that Tut began his reign as Tutankhaten and was maneuvered by his advisers into restoring worship of the old gods. In the miniseries, we get only a brief glimpse of Akhenaten and his son -- a glimpse that makes no mention of the religious conflict -- before we move on to the last years of Tut's reign. In this, we see a rivalry between Tut and High Priest Amun, but we get no real sense of that rivalry's cause. The miniseries' extras suggest that a number of scenes were filmed with Akhenaten and the boy Tut, but these scenes were left out of the miniseries and were unaccountably not included, even as deleted scenes, in the DVD. Their inclusion in an expanded version of Tut would have strengthened it and filled a fan’s desire to see more of the world that Tut restored. If nothing else, the miniseries’ Akhenaten is so impressive that I would have liked to see more of him.
In the real Tutankhamun's reign, Egypt faced a complex set of challenges within the kingdom and a complex set of rivalries and conflicts with rival powers north of the kingdom in what are now Syria and Iraq. No doubt for the sake of a plot that could be run in six hours of television time, the writers of Tut reduced the internal conflict to a plague that weakened the kingdom in the face of foreign invasion, and the external conflict to a single enemy, the Mitanni, portrayed as if they were the southern Nubians. The movie mentions Amurru, who were Semitic foes of the Egyptians from Mesopotamia, but a non-Egyptologist would easily confuse them with the Mitanni in the miniseries.
Having earned a master's degree in microbiology, I have learned never to expect much from Hollywood depictions of an epidemic. Tut did better than many another production has done in portraying its plague, though, in Tut, those who dramatically should have gotten sick did get sick, and those who dramatically should not have gotten sick did not get sick, in the grand Hollywood manor. The miniseries did do a good job of showing how a plague disrupts a kingdom at all levels and how ill equipped ancient empires were to deal with a plague. Over all, the plague scenes gave us a dramatic, dazzling pageant, which, in a production like Tut, is what really counts. Still, I cannot help wondering what the miniseries’ miracle medicine was.
The subplot involving the Mitanni gave us a mixed bag of action scenes. The early battles were majestically and meticulously filmed as fine examples of what battle scenes should be, mixing action on an epic scale with personal drama. The full-speed chariot charges are particularly spectacular. Should we hope for Tut’s producers to remake Ben Hur? Later, however, a long sequence in which Tut and Suhat rescue Lagus from the Mitanni because Tut needs Lagus to help him regain power in Thebes comes to nothing when Lagus proves to be totally irrelevant to how Tut regains power. Still, the Lagus expedition does pay off in a final battle scene that is over the top -- totally unrealistic for its time and place. That being said, the scene was fun if you overlook its impossibilities.
The battle and rescue scenes give us a chance to see Action Tut, which is what we had come to a movie about Tut to see. It is sad, then, that, in real life, if the latest archaeological findings hold up, Tutankhamun was anything but an action figure. Still, would the real Tutankhamun blame us for watching what he might well have wished to be?
Any production on the scale of Tut has faults that one can find. It distracted me for the miniseries to contain a minor, disposable character named Seti. That is a fine Ancient Egyptian name, but anyone with even a smattering of Egyptology knows that Seti would be Horemheb's successor at the Eighteenth Dynasty's end, as this character could never be.
Too, it was distracting for the miniseries' young actors to wear their own long, flowing hair, as real Ancient Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty would never have done. Loathing lice, both men and women shaved their heads; men generally went bald, whereas women wore wigs. Sir Ben Kingsley went authentic; why was what was good enough for him not good enough for everyone else? Many of the female extras looked spectacular in their wigs. As for Ankhsenamun, the Kool-Aid purple highlights in her hair made her seem more like a modern party-goer than an ancient queen.
From time to time, the younger actors, perhaps in an attempt to seem relevant to our time, dropped into contemporary language. It was jarring for me to hear the characters say “OK.” Even more jarring was it for Ankhsenamun to say at one point to Ay, “Are you sure you’re not being paranoid?” Ancient Egypt and modern psychology do not go together. Do the writers not know that Ancient Egyptians spoke Victorian English? At least, viewers of movies set in Ancient Egypt have come to expect it.
What else? Oh, yes, could the half-Mitanni peasant Suhat really have written a letter in hieroglyphics (all right, technically, hieratic)? I also wondered how a Mitanni soldier charging a position of Egyptian archers went down from an arrow in the back. Still, I've heard that strange events take place in battle.
I should mention for prospective viewers that Tut has a number of sex scenes containing partial nudity. Although the sex scenes are fairly explicit, they are not gratuitous, as all of them are deeply rooted in, and advance, the characters' passions and ambitions. How often these days do sex scenes actually advance a plot? Just keep in mind that you would have to be an Olympic athlete actually to do what the characters in the miniseries are shown as doing.
Finally in the nitpicking department, I should mention that, in some scenes, both boy Tut and teen Tut are shown walking with a limp, as the real-life Tutankhamun would have walked. In other scenes, however, the limp is nowhere to be seen. Of course, when Action Tut takes the stage, he verges on being a superhero -- at least to the end.
In the end, the miniseries' intrigue is so well handled that few viewers will be able to guess how the conflict plays out, even though we know from history that Tut, like the Titanic or the planet Krypton, is doomed. Over all, strong performances in a plot of complicated, well-motivated conflicts of life and death amid gorgeous settings and costumes make a lost world come to life before our eyes. If not all that takes place there can be true, it's at least well imagined. For the story, the acting, and the setting, you may well end up watching Tut again and again.
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