Ignorance or negligence?

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2002)

I just saw this on TV - thank God I didn't pay good money to see it on video or in the theatre. I like a silly movie now and then, but silly movies don't have to be stupid - in fact, they can benefit a great deal from an underlying intelligence and sharp wit. But this....pfffft. I was hurling abuse at the TV screen most of the time. It is unbelievable how many mistakes there are in the film: Thebes is in the south of Egypt, and there are no pyramids around it. And what was that stupid desert battle at the beginning? In 1923, Egypt was already under colonial (British) rule, and the main fighters for her freedom were Egyptian politicians of the Wafd party, dressed in Western-style suits and wearing red tarboushes - very, very few Egyptians dress, then or now, the way they did in this movie, all turbans and "dresses". No European would have been thrown in an Egyptian prison then; foreign residents in Egypt enjoyed the privileges of not being subject to Egyptian law for years. The museum of antiquities does not look anything like it does in the movies, and moreover was known then not as "Mathaf el-'Athaar" but as the Antik-khana, as Egypt's Turkish-speaking royal family then referred to it. And the actors' Arabic was appalling! What are these horrible accents? They can barely make themselves understood to anyone who *does* speak it. The Tuareg, the desert tribes mentioned in the movie, live in the western part of the Sahara, nowhere near Egypt.

But worst of all is the racial stereotyping: most of the Egyptians are drawn as cartoonish villains, greedy, cruel and stinking. What rubbish. No wonder this film didn't last a week in Egyptian cinemas.
I would have laughed a lot more if there had been more authenticity (the heroine is, after all, a budding Egyptologist as well as being half-Egyptian), and if it had a little (a lot?) more respect for the history and culture of the people it was so blithely milking for millions of dollars... I wish the studios would remember that not all those in their audience are ignorant people who would believe & enjoy any trash they may care to throw at them. And I have a lot less respect for all the actors who took part in this fiasco, too.