That I would love the movie “Exodus: Gods and Kings” I knew from the moment I read the verdict of the reviewers — they hated it. The New York Times complained that the Egyptian oppressors wear “heavy eye-liner” and that the women “mostly stand around holding trays and pitchers while the men thunder and hiss.” Time magazine called it “a stolid mess.” Another review had a headline: “Spoiler Alert: God Wins.

What in blazes did they expect? What is it about Exodus that even after all these millennia keeps enticing mere mortals to attempt a retelling? We know God wins, and we still keep coming back. No doubt the reason is that the original facts are so inspiring that even those artists who fall short — compared to Moses, everyone does — can still amaze. This is what Ridley Scott did to the packed Brooklyn cinema where I saw the film.

It didn’t bother the wonderfully diverse audience that everyone knew the plot. Many of them retell it every year. The commandment that Jews think of ourselves as having been personally at Sinai is one that millions keep. The suspense in the movie is in the embroidery and the imagining that Scott does of the blank spaces in the story. This begins with Moses, a general under Pharaoh Seti I, preparing with his “brother” Prince Ramses, to attack the Hittites.

Seti tells them a prophecy — that one will save the other and emerge a leader. The battle scenes — the horses, the chariots, the sound effects, the pace — are some of the best ever filmed. It’s Moses who saves Ramses. Moses discovers who he really is at Pithon, where he is sent by the Pharaoh to investigate the conditions of the Hebrew slaves. He discloses the truth to Ramses in a powerful confrontation in front of Moses’ sister, Miriam, and is sent into exile.

This is where, at Midian, he meets and marries Zipporah under the wedding canopy we now know of as the chuppah. In the movie it is of a blue and white striped cloth, foreshadowing the prayer shawls known as tallit and the flag of Israel.

God’s revelation to Moses is the most controversial part of the film — in that He appears not only as a voice from the burning bush but, in Ridley Scott’s embroidery, as a young boy — presumably the “angel of the Lord” in Exodus 3 — beside the flames. At times the boy and Moses even take tea together.

Welcome to Hollywood.

Yet the story gets even better, when Moses returns to Egypt and warns the Pharaoh. We watch Ramses rage — “but I am the god!” — as the rivers run red and Egypt is beset by locusts, boils, lice and hail. Mrs. Ramses wakes up screaming in a bed swarming with frogs. We see Ramses discover his own firstborn son dead in his gilded crib. It is hard to imagine that the plagues will ever be more astonishingly evoked.

But they are nothing compared to the climactic chapter in this remarkable film — the race to freedom and the parting of the Red Sea. Scientists have puzzled for centuries over how this could have happened. Some insist it didn’t. Despite all their theories, still the millions seek to imagine what it must have been like.

And, oh, what a job Ridley Scott does of this. A thousand Egyptian chariots, flags horizontal in the wind, are at their backs. The sea is in front of them. Mr. Scott depicts as a sword the staff Moses flings into the sea.

Then we see the waters, with exquisite slowness, start to part. The liberated Hebrew slaves follow Moses among the puddles to which the mighty sea has been reduced. How Ramses whips his horses, as his army thunders toward doom.

The cinematography is breathtaking. (My guess is that Ridley Scott has spent some time in front of the canvases of the master sea-scape painter J.M.W. Turner.) Then it is on to Sinai.

The last we see of Moses, he is resting his hand on the ark of the covenant as he is being trundled toward Canaan, where, though he dies before he gets there, his followers were liberated again in our own time. Were Ridley Scott to tell that story, imagine what the critics would say.

This column originally appeared in the New York Post.