Go Woke, Moses

When Netflix announced their docudrama-miniseries, Testament: The Life of Moses, directed by Benjamin Ross, I had high expectations to see again the story of the abandoned and rescued baby, the Ten Commandments, The Exodus, the Red Sea and everything that any human being on this planet with more or less some kind of culture injected in the brain knows or at least has heard or has a minimum reference to. But this documentary in three parts of 80 minutes each, full of dramatizations and interviews, is incredibly boring and extremely long.

From the beginning, Ross interrupts the rhythm too many times. There is a key to docudramas, and that is to know when to cut the dramatization so that the expert, interviewee or whatever enters. And this is where Testament fails. The documentary displays a total languor, a lack of emotion in the secondary actors that makes you wonder if they understand what they represent and the bombast of the story that should be enveloping them. Even the Pharaohs look like anything but Pharaohs.

Trying to understand God and Netflix

Before the bad and utterly confusing part, I must say that there is no better choice for the voice of God (yes, I’ll just say God so as not to muddle this up any further) than Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) himself. I’d you hear him tell you “’I AM THAT I AM. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto thee,” Well, you have to believe him and go all the way.

Then I read something that more or less perplexed me and that is one of the big problems with this docuseries. And this comes straight from Netflix: “Anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments as a child was well aware of the more epic elements of the tale,” producers Emre Sahin and Kelly McPherson told Netflix. “The burning bush, the plagues, Passover, the Red Sea, and, of course, the Ten Commandments.

What really drew us in was the mystery of Moses’ inner life, his struggles with his own identity, his self-doubt, his humanness.” The problem is that contrary to what they proposed, the result is a Moses who is cold, distant and far from being someone who causes empathy. And it is not a problem of the actor, it is a problem of the script that sought to personalize a character so much that he does not fit into the greatness of the context in which history, God or his destiny have placed him.

But I’m going to go to what a normal audience would detect and I don’t even dare to go into the research that Rabbi Shlomo Litvin did where he found over 430 inaccuracies in the docuseries. This is somewhat disconcerting and has a certain whiff of fraud when we see the final product that the entire audience of this planet was supposed to witness.

There are three episodes:  “The Prophet” begins with Moses, portraying the life of Moses from a child to being a prince of Egypt. Next comes “The Plagues”. I don’t think there’s much to explain, but if I’m not mistaken the documentary skipped one of them. Although the last episode, “The Promised Land,” is the best in cinematic terms, it doesn’t seem that Netflix gave all the resources the show needed, but rather it’s like  a lukewarm and perhaps somewhat afraid attempt to confront such an enormous topic and story.

Perhaps that is why there’s an imbalance between the number of interviewees and their poor organization and the flawed script in terms of what the scriptures describe and large gaps between what we see on the screen. The director did the best he could with what he had, achieving a Moses that in moments (the initial ones) is credible and trying to give context to a multiplicity of opinions.

But (even though Avi Azulay isn’t a bad Moses) the real problem was trying to make a documentary, a dramatized series, a refreshing of a story that involves three religions…all at the same time. That certainly couldn’t go well. And when we see the parade of experts and not so experts popping up all over the place saying whatever they feel like about Moses and how they interpret everything, instead of clarifying, they distort and turn not only the character but things like Egyptian slavery and even the ten plagues into something meaningless or unexplained, like when Ross asks one of the expert why God was, to use a term, a bad guy, to send the ten plagues and the expert (I paraphrase) just says something like, “I have no idea.”

The visual effects may not have been the best, but there is something that you cannot forgive. With certain scenes, such as at Mount Sinai, or the Red Sea, you cannot spare a single dollar . If you are going to dare to dramatize this, you have to be big, magnificent, breathtaking… because the technology exists to achieve it and make it so epic that we forget about old Charlton Heston and his Ten Commandments! Today you can do something so incredible that there is no forgiveness for taking such an important story and not doing the best that technology can offer. But if there isn’t even a good foundational basis in the script, the rest doesn’t matter. And it’s a shame. Not just for believers, but for all audiences who enjoy a good production.