Noah: The Should, the Could and the Empty (Film Snob #5)

If you go into Noah expecting a Christian film about a Bible story, you’re gonna have a bad time.

If you go into Noah expecting a creative interpretation of an ancient tale, you will be much happier.

Maybe.

I hope.

Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly are paired together once again (the first time being the magnificent A Beautiful Mind), only now being thrown way back to only ten generations since Adam and Eve. Darren Aronofsky, of Black Swan and The Wrestler fame, wrote and directed this revisitation of an age-old story that has been passed down for many years. The kid from Percy Jackson is here (don’t know name, don’t care) as well, but my favorite performances were turned in by Ray Winstone, as the horrid Tubal-Cain, Emma Watson as Ila, the wife of Shem, and Connelly as Naameh, Noah’s wife.

Ray Winstone has been a personal favorite of mine ever since I saw him as the gritty Mr. French in The Departed. Here, he plays a villain that embodies everything bad about humanity: selfishness, megalomania, greed, gluttony, and materialism. He claims himself to be king of the world, and leads his army against Noah and his family in order to take the Ark for himself. Winstone plays this role perfectly and I could not have asked for a better villain in a Bible story that really avoided any mention of conflict besides “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth” in Scripture. Tubal-Cain gives us a much more direct face of this evil, and added to the story, in my opinion.

Emma Watson delivered a very emotional story as Ila, who is a girl that Noah and his family stumble upon while they are on their way to meet Methuselah. She gives us a very empathetic character who we immediately care for and who Noah grows to love as a daughter. Watson often became a scene stealer, leaving most other actors in the dust. And finally, Jennifer Connelly gave a great performance as Noah’s wife, becoming a strong supporting figure for a disoriented Noah while also standing as the voice of reason when things go awry. She is not a woman to be trampled upon, and delivers her speeches with incredible emotion and believability. But what else did we really expect from the actress who won an Oscar as Russell Crowe’s wife in A Beautiful Mind?

Some disclaimers would not be amiss right now. There are several instances of brutal violence in this film, including a protruding bone and piles of corpses. A lizard gets eaten alive. Ila and Shem have sex offscreen, which made total sense to me since they’re as married as you could be back then, but apparently it has bothered some people who think that no one ever had sex in the Bible. Noah gets to witness firsthand how horrible the human race is to each other and to animals, which disturbs both him and us. The screams of drowning people can be heard from within the Ark after the Flood begins, which is realistic, again, but can be quite disturbing. We even get a glimpse of them trying to survive atop a slowly covered mountaintop.

Now I have to examine the story a bit further. I will insert a

>>>SPOILER ALERT<<<

right about here so that you know whether to stop reading or not. There is simply no way to examine the contents of this movie’s plot without giving some details, and so be warned. Continue reading if you want to know why this movie is generating so much controversy. Otherwise, skip to the next lone italic line with a bunch of arrows to avoid any spoilers.

The story of Noah, as the book of Genesis tells it, lasts about four chapters. Like most of the Old Testament, it gives you the cut-and-dry facts of what happened, and who it happened to. Nothing more. As always, when a director or screenwriter set out to create a film, they have to add or change things about the source material in order to make the movie entertaining. That being said, I’m going to briefly discuss several points of artistic license that Aronofsky decided to take with the hallowed story of Noah.

First, the rock monsters that everyone seems to be making such a fuss about: they are simply an envisioning of Nephilim. Yes, the Nephilim in Genesis that are fallen angels and “walk the earth among men.” Trust me, they’re in there. The Bible gives no details on how they looked, what they did (besides that they slept with human women), or what their purpose was. This film decides to make them fallen angels that crashed into earth and became enveloped by it, causing them to look like rock monsters. This became key to the movie’s version of how the ark was built, since it only takes them ten years in this version (in Scripture, it took 100 years, but for the sake of cinema, gets reduced) because the Watchers, as they’re called, help them build it. I was okay with this interpretation, but the movie definitely casts them in a sympathetic light (including God accepting them back into heaven after helping Noah), which is much more debatable.

Second, the Watchers are established as beings who tried to help mankind learn about the earth, including metallurgy and architecture. Then men turned on the Watchers and killed most of them, driving into hiding. Once again, this was definitely artistic license, but I was okay with it for the movie. It set up for the majority of the movie taking place in a scorched earth, which we really wouldn’t know how it looked before God decided to reset Creation, so this is another translation I can live with. Third, God is shown to communicate to Noah throughout the film through visions and signs. I’m okay with this translation, even though Genesis says that God directly spoke to Noah.

Fourth, a large battle is shown once the rain starts beginning for the Flood, which basically consists of Tubal-Cain and his men attacking the Ark while Noah and the Watchers defend it. Once again, there is nothing about this in the Bible, but it certainly made sense to me. All of these animals, and ongoing construction, happening for all of those years and no one tried to stop Noah or board his ark? Naw, I don’t believe that for one second. Fifth, Tubal-Cain is shown sneaking onto the Ark, which obviously didn’t actually happen, but it set up for a final confrontation between himself and Noah (as well as placing Ham in a critical situation) that I enjoyed, so this didn’t bother me either.

However, there is one final aspect of this story that did bother me. Since God only speaks to Noah through visions, nothing is ever a clear order. So, Noah has to translate God’s messages. This results in him believing that in order for Creation to be reset completely, the human race must be removed from it. First off,

NO!!!!

he does not try to kill his family! I am so tired of hearing about this. He simply decides that his family will die off together over time (since Ila is barren due to a stomach wound when she was a child). But, before dying, Methuselah heals Ila, so that she becomes pregnant with Shem’s child. This leaves Noah with a complex situation where he believes that God wants him to end mankind, but there is no way to complete that task except to kill the baby if it is a girl. This results in a bizarre melodrama for the last 45 minutes of the film that ends with him almost killing the baby in an Abraham-Isaac manner before he decides that he cannot do it.

This infanticidal portion of the movie could easily have been cut, in my opinion, and pushed me a bit too far. That being said, infanticide is not exactly a foreign thing in the Old Testament (see the Binding of Isaac, Moses and Egypt). But seeing it in a physical form, with Emma Watson begging for the life of her child, really shocks you and drives the tension way up. I won’t say it didn’t add to the movie, because it really did, but it pushed the boundaries of what can be accepted in a translation of a Bible story.

Alright, I think it’s safe now to insert a

>>>SPOILERS BEGONE<<<

right about here, so I can wrap up this review. Overall, this was a very entertaining film, but it had its flaws and the final act really dragged. This could have been cut down by thirty minutes, but I still enjoyed it. If you can imagine a PG-13 version of a Biblical 300 mixed with Game of Thrones, I think that you’ll get the gist of this film. I have to say, one of my favorite movie moments this year came from a montage when Noah describes creation, showing Cain bringing a rock down upon Abel’s head in a side-view silhouette form, and suddenly, men of different time periods and nationalities flash through the two silhouettes as the murder is completed, signifying every moment in man’s history where we have turned upon each other. It’s truly a beautiful moment, but some might find this Biblical movie’s relative lack of spirituality unnerving or “unholy”.

In closing, I would like to add a quote here from Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family:
"Darren Aronofsky is not a theologian, nor does he claim to be. He is a filmmaker and a storyteller, and in Noah, he has told a compelling story. The film expresses biblical themes of good and evil; sin and redemption; justice and mercy. It is a creative interpretation of the scriptural account that allows us to imagine the deep struggles Noah may have wrestled with as he answered God's call on his life. This cinematic vision of Noah's story gives Christians a great opportunity to engage our culture with the biblical Noah, and to have conversations with friends and family about matters of eternal significance."

A link to Plugged In's review of Noah is right here as well, whose concluding statements can be considered to be close to what I would write here about the overall message of the movie.

Verdict: Christians PROBABLY SHOULD see this film if you want a fresh perspective on a dry story that has been perpetuated as a dull happiness-and-rainbows-ooh-look-zebras story for many centuries. If you any of the material that I discussed in this review offended you, or you thought The Passion of the Christ was inaccurate because of its brutality, or you want all movies based on Scripture to be 100% accurate, or you  love the white-Jesus-flannelgraph Bible stories, this will probably be one to avoid. To non-Christians, this is still an entertaining movie with a creative story, so give it a chance.

P.S. – This is the only review I’ve ever done with spoilers. I feel dirty.