Not sure I would have seen Noah otherwise, but there was a preview screening at the Museum of the Moving Image.
It's an interesting movie, in a better way than when your spouse is saying your banana bread is interesting, but I'm still not sure it's actually a good movie.
But interesting.
The first interesting thing is the complete lack of sugar coating. We can spend so much time with bible stories growing up, the idealized kinds of stories suitable for children of all ages, that we can forget that most of the people in those stories are kind of crazy. Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Noah certainly. And the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let us forget that about Noah. Nor does the portrayal by Russell Crowe. There isn't a thing about the movie that lets us forget that you have to be a certain kind of crazy to build an ark because God tells you to, and to do most of the things that Noah goes around doing in the classic bible story of Noah. It's an interesting choice, and I respect it. I'm so tired of heroes in cinema that I was kind of delighted here when Noah forces his son Ham to abandon his girlfriend, who doesn't fare well in the immediate aftermath. Not what we're supposed to do, not what we're used to seeing, not what we like to think of when we think of God and doing God's work and being Godly. But it's actually true to the nature of the Old Testament, where bad things happen to people.
It's interesting to see the use of classic elements of sf/fantasy to provide the presence of God in the movie. You need the hand of God to make the story of Noah work. To make it rain for those 40 days. To get Noah to build the ark. To keep the ark from being attacked and destroyed by the saner people in Noah's universe. So if you've got to have a supernatural entity casting its gaze and spirit over the movie, why not have it be a cross between Tolkien/Peter Jackson's ents and Brandon Sanderson's koloss.
The movie has a bad guy, and the bad guy isn't the strength of the movie in cinematic story terms. But in the bibliical sense, the character makes for some itneresting parallels with the story of Adam and Eve, providing temptation which mankind has to either embrace or resist. The decision on what to do in Noah is much more interesting than asking what card you have in your wallet.
I dozed off only briefly, and I could easily have gotten sleepy-eyed for a lot more of the movie than this. It's an interesting movie. I'm hesitant to give it a recommendation, but I wouldn't warn anyone against.
Great post; it brings up a whole sidebar of stuff, not only about how in-your-face Bronze Age cosmology was (it's always lots of fun watching suburban church people trying to make these tales user-friendly) but it also spotlights why YA and Intermediate fiction is almost always God-free. No.1 of course is they're scared to death of offending someone, as there's more than a few people out there still on a Bronze Age page, and the other is that it's just too much to expect that kids would know enough about traditions like this to be able to process them, and don't look to us to bring them up to speed. The most egregious example (don't worry, I'm going somewhere here) recently was the brilliant BARTIMAEUS trilogy by Jonahthan Stroud, in which an alternative future society run by High Ceremonial Magicians can function without anyone ever mentioning God... Even the most casual glance at this odd subject will show that you're not going to get much mileage out of Djinns and golems without the secret names of God wherewith to motivate them. But somebody on the editorial end decided to opt for safe-and-sane fireworks which let most of the air out of the baloon, IMHO. Well, anyway, good post, and you might get more responses if you used a more user-friendly response engine... Kevin A. Lewis
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