NEW YORK, Aug 1 — A box-office flop but an unexpected hit when Summit Entertainment released it on disc in June, the US$140 million (RM563 million) extravaganza Gods of Egypt is the latest iteration of the sword-and-sandal spectacles that first impressed movie audiences in the years before World War I.

Italian filmmakers pioneered the peplum, as the genre was named for its unisex mini-tunics, but, with the films of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, Hollywood came forth with kindred productions. Other national industries did as well, but Italians and Americans have proved most attached to the mode. For Italians, the peplum recalled the glory that was Rome; for Hollywood in the 1950s, such movies served to showcase the cinematic might of the American imperium that arose from the ashes of World War II.

Gods of Egypt, directed by Alex Proyas (best known for The Crow and Dark City), has no such agenda, although Proyas, who is of Greek descent and was born in Alexandria, Egypt, might seem well suited to revisit the world of the peplum. For all its Egyptian bric-a-brac, however, Gods is largely set in a place resembling an earthquake-prone, Caribbean megaresort populated by men attired in leather frocks and women who favour studded bikini tops and snug pareus.

When it comes to the peplum, costumes are less important than projecting the fantasy of a pre-Christian civilisation. While it’s true that Old Testament Hebrews are often shown as proto-Christians and early Christians frequently figure in tales of imperial Rome, these movies typically wallow in pagan “immorality,” if only to deplore it.

Gods of Egypt is post-pagan and post-Christian. Its model is less the Egyptian Book of the Dead than the Marvel comic book Thor. Despite a subplot involving two mortal lovers (Brenton Thwaites and Courtney Eaton), the movie is basically a power struggle between a hunky pair of cosmic roughnecks, Horus (Danish actor and Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Set (Gerard Butler). Other deities include a slinky love goddess (Élodie Yung) and fey brainiac Thoth (Chadwick Boseman, who is an exception to the movie’s gratuitously Eurocentric casting).

Geoffrey Rush gives the sun god Ra a humorously smug hauteur: His personal space station, positioned high above the digital masses, and the atomic-powered, Uzi-like automatic weapon that he fires each night at an approaching dragon of darkness epitomize the movie’s cheesy grandeur. Rush also gets to deliver the prize groaners in the clichéd dialogue written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless: “There are some things worse than Set,” he puns by way of introducing the monster.

With its constant shape-shifting, cart wheeling narrative idiocies, Hong Kong-inflected action pyrotechnics and frequent fissures opening in the time-space continuum, Proyas’ movie is seldom dull. “If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.

As a peplum, though, the movie is decidedly decadent. The digitally contrived effect in which 9-foot gods mix it up with normal-size mortals suggests nothing so much as celebrities slumming with their fans. The only religion here is show business.

By contrast, Alexander the Great (1956), reissued on Blu-ray by Twilight Time, is a self-pondering peplum and one of the few big-budget examples that might be considered a personal statement.

Robert Rossen (1908-1966) wrote, produced and directed Alexander the Great to mark his triumphant return from the Hollywood blacklist after cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee. However ham-fisted his filmmaking, Rossen — the son of a Lower East Side rabbi — was a serious man. (The credits for Alexander list Prince Peter of Greece as technical adviser.)

Despite an atmosphere of unrelenting pomp and the alarmingly blond fright wig worn by Richard Burton in the title role, Alexander the Great has little to engage a taste for camp or surrealism. If anything, this leaden yet intermittently fascinating movie anticipates Spartacus (1960) in its attempt to dress political issues in a toga, while administering a dollop of Freud. The impetuous Alexander requires only a few seconds to cut the Gordian knot, but needs much of the movie’s 136 minutes to free himself, if he ever does, from his Oedipal family bonds.

As a character study, Alexander is the logical successor to Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), about a slum-born prize-fighter’s rise, fall and redemption, and his Oscar-winning 1949 adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, which concerned an American demagogue’s lust for power. The movie not only broods upon the nature of freedom and cost of civilisation but also wonders what it might mean to imagine oneself divine. (Clearly, Rossen had the conquering dictators Hitler and Stalin on his mind.)

In dramatising these weighty thoughts, Rossen, an effective director of actors, is well served by his cast. Alexander has some memorable performances from, among others, Danielle Darrieux and Fredric March as Alexander’s warring parents, Claire Bloom as his strong-minded mistress and Peter Cushing as his Athenian adversary.

Burton, who plays Alexander as a man with a head full of ideas that have driven him insane, delivers his most ridiculous lines with a furious conviction appropriate to his role. (Even as a child, Alexander “believed himself a god,” explains his erstwhile tutor, Aristotle.)

If Alexander’s announced mission was “to bring Greek culture to the world,” Burton’s was to bring gravitas to Rossen’s movie. He succeeds, as does the labour-intensive spectacle itself. Decades into the age of CGI, there’s a poignant quality to the sight of real sets, actual locations and hordes of human extras on the screen.

New on video

Hail, Caesar!

The Coen brothers take aim at Cold War-era Hollywood, burlesquing its scandals, blacklist and ancient world spectaculars. In her review for The New York Times in February, Manohla Dargis described how “the Coens are scratching off the glossy studio veneer to show what lies beneath.” Available on Blu-ray, DVD and Amazon Video. (Universal)

Helen of Troy

Newly reconstructed and beautifully restored, German director Manfred Noa’s 1924 silent feature, a two-part version of the Iliad, is a rediscovered chunk of European film history. This all-region DVD is compatible with most DVD players. (Filmmuseum)

Iphigenia

Greek filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis dramatises the Euripides tragedy, which he earlier staged in New York, in situ. Reviewing the movie in 1977, Times critic Vincent Canby admired some aspects of the film but not the acting, noting that “Irene Papas, with her magnificent profile intact and her eyebrows in full bloom, plays Clytemnestra as if she were Mother Earth.” On Blu-ray and DVD. (Olive Films)

Revolt of the Slaves

Rhonda Fleming appears as a Roman patrician who falls for a Christian slave in this standard-issue 1960 Italian peplum, directed by Nunzio Malasomma with English dialogue by Hollywood screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring. On DVD. (MGM Limited Edition)

Samson and Delilah

Made for TV, this version of the Old Testament story, televised in the United States in 1996 and now reissued on DVD, stars Elizabeth Hurley as the Philistine temptress with Eric Thal as the hero she lays low. Diana Rigg, Michael Gambon and Dennis Hopper are also on hand; Nicolas Roeg directed with a mainly Italian crew. (Shout! Factory) — The New York Times