SAW THE MOVIE...NOAH

Just saw the movie NOAH with Russell Crowe, etc.

We are movies based on Biblical stories junkies. We grew up on Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, Samson & Delilah, Ten Commandments, etc.; we know how we like our Bible stories portrayed.

NOAH was different in a number of ways but mostly our new digital age has made portraying miraculous scenes very realistically and NOAH is no exception.

The acting, directing and cinematography are almost always brilliant but it is the “story” that I care most about and many “brilliant” movies have left me cold as to their “story”.

We all know the story of NOAH or the “flood” story in Genesis. The actual story in Genesis was a re-telling of a flood story from the great epic of GILGAMESH from around 2500 B.C. so it is hardly original. In fact, the Genesis story is an amalgamation of two different flood narratives…there are scholars that study nothing but this…really.

Obviously, the guy making this movie (Darren Aronofsky)(Jewish atheist) has to make a movie that excites and dazzles thereby generating enough buzz to get many people to want to see it so he has to take some “dramatic license” to jazz it up; he is not retelling the Bible story word for word on film…it would be boring.

For me and my wife, we expect miracles but we also like enough “realism” to make it believable and not cartoonish. In NOAH, the use of “angels” turned into “boulder” creatures by God because they tried to help the humans is a little much and spoils that realism we look for in these types of movies.

Yes, these boulder (rock) creatures play a vital role in the movie since they basically built the ark and they kept the raging hordes from occupying the ark but I think the writers could have come up with a better vehicle to fill that slot.

I liked the fact that the Big Bang theory was visualized during creation and that evolution was also visualized…this will definitely piss off the creationist and I think already has!

I also liked the fact that the writers played up the dualism of man as the ruler of the world against man as only the creature of God on earth.

Yes, the movie was a “spectacle” on the big screen and I did enjoy it but did not love it.