Politics and theology aside, The Passion is art. Noah is a marketing strategy. And, in fairness, maybe it ought to be reviewed on those terms. You can’t condemn it for being a poor Biblical adaptation, because it isn’t a Biblical adaptation. You can’t condemn it for being a bad movie, because it isn’t a movie. It must be considered as it is: a gimmick. A brilliant gimmick, for sure. If the movie studio wanted to spin a yarn about mythical beasts, epic battles, homicidal sea captains, and a pagan Earth god, they could have done so. They could have called it anything. They could have told their own story. But they called it Noah because they knew that the supposed connection to the Bible would garner immediate fascination. They knew there would be controversy, and controversy sells. They padded it with enough action movie clichés to draw interest from secular crowds, they hid the outright blasphemy well enough to please gullible Christian crowds, and they mocked Biblical theology blatantly enough to delight the critics. They came up with a way to make millions while exploiting the various sensibilities of different audience demographics. That was their first and primary intention, and in it they succeeded wildly. As an adaptation or retelling of Judeo-Christian theology, it’s a blatant mockery. As a film, it’s like the script for a Syfy Network miniseries got shoved into a blender with the treatment for a Lifetime channel made-for-TV movie and then mixed with enough moping nihilism and environmentalist sermonizing to fool pretentious elitists into using words like ‘daring’ and ‘relevant’ when describing it. In other words, it’s aggressively abysmal. But, as a money-making ploy, it’s a downright masterpiece. Final assessment: Four Stars for marketing No Stars for quality, substance, coherence, meaning, or theological accuracy.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 19:43:39 +0000
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