Ok I confess… I was so desperate to find a movie to which I could take my family…. I was desperate to like this movie because I hoped that critical themes like original sin, evolution, the idea of a personal God that cares about people, would be presented to the masses and that perhaps some good may come of it…. This film can be described by an axiom my grandpa used to use…”Mark, you can paint poop, but it’s still poop.” This movie is a very thinly veiled comment on the religious extremists….and even as such, the film is schizophrenic and often forgets who and what it is trying to be. The film opens with text that gets the viewer caught up on creation…. It offers a handful of seconds to Cain and Abel, and then begins to develop characters that simply do not exist anywhere in any creation story in any religion on this planet….. Bizarrely, the writer takes up Genesis 6 and the idea of the Nephelim, and twists these already very highly contended verses into a monster movie-ish cartoon. The immediate comment here is, “the Genesis story ( in the obvious view of the author) has all the credibility of a monster movie. Genesis 6 describes some hybrid between man and fallen angels; the Nephelim. Regardless of where the Christian falls on the Genesis 6 account, I think we can all agree that the Nephelim were not…( I cant believe I am typing this…) rock people….. yes, I said rock people…. not rock people in the sense of Jimi Hendrix, or David Lee Roth, but instead, animated rock being indwelled by glowing light that protrudes from their eyes and from various cracks in their exo-skeletons. I must confess that the writer would have been closer to the mark to portray the Nephelim as Rock and Roll stars…. I would have bought Meatloaf or Gwar much more readily than these CGI creations. Now the biggest problem to me in this whole film is the dual track that runs through it… on one track we have a writer who only gave perhaps 60 seconds of screen time to Satan… who of course is a major player in the fall of man… On this wacky track we also have the writer portraying these rock monsters as very sympathetic characters…who willingly came to Earth to help Adam and Eve…vs. the orthodox understanding of the fallen angles.. who were cast down to Earth for following Satan…who again is strangely absent from this whole film…..On this shoddy track we have the rock dudes working for foreman Noah, and doing virtually all of the building of the Ark themselves…… again..not orthodox….we have Noah’s sons clamoring for wives, and Noah withholding this from them… vs. the orthodox account that has them coupled up as they enter the Ark…… We then see Noah protecting life for animals and flowers, only to deduce God’s will to watch his family die off and to accelerate the effort by planning to murder his own grandchildren….. I could go on..but you get the idea…. Wacky…heretical….and as we leap to the second track….silly….just plain silly….There are more scientific and logistical problems with with this film than can be discussed in this little review… suffice to say this… it seems the writer spent so much time and energy lampooning the genesis flood account, that simply had no brain cells left with which to work out basic plot logic issues in his script….. I will give you one such flaw…Noah lives with his family for 9ish months on this Ark..an ark that he and his rocky pals built together… and Tubal Cain cut a hole in the side of the Ark and slipped un unnoticed just as the waters were rising…..Noah.. who inventories animals.. who engineered the large craft…. Who presumably hears from God personally….. somehow missed the fact that old Tubal Cain had punched a hole on the boat that should have allowed massive volumes of water in the boat……oh.. and get this….Tubal Cain likes to eat the animals on this boat….raw…..tar tar…..This plot point is a metaphor for the film itself….The film, “Noah” has many such holes in its boat, and the writers, directors, and producer apparently were about as blind to these gaping problems as Noah was with his enemy incursion…… The film ends with Noah living in a cave.. on a lovely beach.. dealing with massive alienation from his family and from his God… very significantly… both Tubal Cain and Noah make many attempts to coax God into speaking directly to them both…… Noah ands up receiving visions…one of them via a Peyote like elixir whipped up by old ( very old) uncle Methuselah)….so wacky……. The point the author is making is obvious…”if there is a God, why will He not speak to mankind?” …OK… the easy answer here is this…. If God saw this film…he would be completely justified in never speaking to any of the writers again…… The more theologically sound answer is this…. God did speak to Noah.. Noah was a prophet…. Noah was flawed.. but was also “pure in his generations” and is clearly portrayed as a man who loves the Lord….. The writer of this film ( it seems to me) will not make secular movie fans happy.. and he will incur much wrath from Christian movie goers…. In short.. this seems like a vanity project…he made it to make himself happy and to lampoon people of faith and the creation accounts that emerge from several of the more prominent religions. In the end, I think no one will like this film.. and the lampooning will largely be directed right back at him……On a 1 to 4 star rating system I give the film….. – 312 stars
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 23:48:35 +0000
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