The Ten Commandments – A classic !

The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille on Blu-ray
My rating: 7 out of 10 stars

The Egyptian Prince, Moses, learns of his true heritage as a Hebrew and his divine mission as the deliverer of his people.

It was a long time since I watched this movie for the first time and then it was certainly not in a theater as I was not even born when this movie saw the light of day (or perhaps rather the darkness of a movie theater). I obviously did not watch it in a theater this time either but at least I now have a somewhat decent home cinema setup and, for being such an old film, I have to say that the studio did a quite good job at transferring it to Blu-ray.

Let us be clear this film is, in some respects, awful by todays standards. You cannot say much about the plot of course since it is pretty much set in stone (pun intended) for this movie. However no matter how awesome they might have been back in 1956 the special effects show their age. That is not really very surprising. What did surprise me though was how weird and awkward a lot of the acting was. In many scenes the actors seemed to think they where actually standing on a old-fashioned opera scene with their exaggerated gestures and speech-like deliveries of their lines. At times it was really laughable.

Yet I consider this a movie worthy of 7 out of 10 stars meaning that I quite liked it. Why is that one might wonder? Well, to me this movie is one of the great classics from a time when movies was not just another consumer product but really something magical and when going to see a movie was something special. Although I cannot claim to have been around at the time, watching this movie yesterday still brought back fond memories of the times when my father brought me to one of the neighboring towns to watch a movie and that alone makes it worthy of those stars to me.

My Movie Collection