I've been watching a lot of the "Exodus" movies (Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), The Ten Commandments (1956), etc.) Is there any single film which accurately depicts the Egypt of Exodus? If so, which one? I'm not so concerned about the historicity of Exodus itself, rather the portrayals of Egyptian culture and society of the purported time frame of the Exodus.
Disclaimer: I don't have a graduate degree in history.
You know, "The Ten Commandments" is a silly and historically inaccurate technicolor 1950s swords & sandals epic for all kinds of reasons.
But now that movies are made in the style of (gag) "Exodus: G&K," you have to hand it to the makers of The Ten Commandments. The costumes, the furniture, parts of the sets are very obviously based on the real thing, in consultation with Egyptologists. You can even see the cartouches of Seti I and Ramesses II.
Now, that's totally unthinkable. In Exodus, they just made an oval, lopped off the line at the bottom, and filled it with random pseudo-hieroglyphs that they thought looked cool, I guess imagining that real pharaonic cartouches were ugly or something, and that they could improve upon them with their stupid and hideous caricatures of hieroglyphs.
Everyone is dressed in some ludicrous fantastical outfit that's probably yellow, on the assumption (for some reason) that everything in Ancient Egypt was yellow. Now look at the clothes in The Ten Commandments and compare them to Egyptian paintings.
In the Ten Commandments, you can even see the pylons and obelisks of (presumably) Pi-Ramesses, instead of New Kingdom pyramids randomly dotting the landscape and that bizarre yellow portico. In retrospect, 50s movies are rather sweet, and more respectful of history than what we're likely to see today. Tutankhamun was still fresh in the minds of adults over 40. The stills of Exodus that I've seen look more like Middle Earth.
Chances are that we're never going to see Ancient Egypt in hardcore historical realism. A mass Western audience would never accept it: too African, too ancient, too different, too fascinating.
I'd have to say none of them because they are all pandering towards the biblical crowd. Egypt, especially in early film was considered romantic, the idea, and the people, were all highly sexual-ized. This being said, no one wanted to see stunted inbred pharaohs. When those movies were being made, they were made with the intention of telling the story of the Bible, to my knowledge no other movies exist of that era besides documentaries. If you are interested in Post Alexander Egypt however, the television series Rome does a very good portrayal of Hellenic Egypt, from the few scenes depicting Egypt.