Testament The Story of Moses: Netflix’s docudrama is more drama than documentary

It’s baffling why Testament The Story of Moses didn’t go all out as a drama, because the religious scholars featured don’t offer anything insightful

Avi Azulay as Moses in the three-part docu-drama

Testament The Story of Moses story: A Hebrew infant, Moses, is set afloat in a basket in the Nile in the hope of escaping the Egyptian Pharaoh’s kill order of all newborn boys. The Pharaoh’s sister chances upon the baby and takes him home to rear as her own and while he grows up as Egyptian royalty, Moses’ heart bleeds at the suffering unleashed by ‘his’ people on the Israelites.

When he ends up killing an Egyptian task master for torturing an Israeli slave, Moses is forced to flee, a journey on which he not only discovers his Hebrew origins, but also that God has chosen him as the one who will lead his people from Egypt to the promised land.

Testament The Story of Moses review: The story of prophet Moses is one that reflects in the scriptures of the Christians, Jews and Muslims, which is perhaps why Netflix chose him as the subject of a three-part docudrama capturing his life and time. The idea was to present the story and the interpretations of the events in his life, as per the three different religions.

The problem with that though is that the showrunners decided to focus more on the dramatization, than what the scholars thought about how God went about in making Moses the man who’d lead his chosen people to the promised land. In fact, some of the ‘observations’ these theological scholars make are not even accompanied by explanations, like, for instance, when a pastor’s daughter wonders why God would unleash such horrid plagues on the Egyptians. The Bible says that God made man; why then were only the Israelites his children and not the rest?

God’s solution to most problems has been a total reset of things, whether it was with Noah and his ark, or Moses and the Israelites, which seems pretty harsh, with forgive and forget not really something he follows strictly. And none of the scholars have a plausible explanation about why he chose one race over another, when everyone should be equal in the eyes of the lord. What was interesting, though, was the supposed correlation between the plagues and the gods that the Egyptians prayed to.

It’s been a while since I’d read the exodus, so the Netflix show served as a very lengthy Sunday school refresher class. The acting, especially Avi Azulay as Moses, was not bad, as also the VFX of the plagues and miracles that. It would have, perhaps, been a lot more effective if they’d just kept the interviews out and kept the narrative to a much crisper edit, than the 80-90 minutes each episode is currently.

Testment The Story of Moses verdict: Anyone who’s read the scriptures in any of the three religions Moses features in will not find anything worthwhile in this docudrama. But if you are among those who are unlikely to pick up a Bible, Quran or Torah, but would still be fascinated by these tales, you could give this one a try; just watch it on 1.5 speed.

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