Occam's Razor

I was going to say this is a whale of a tale, but that would be a movie about Jonah. You may say to yourself after thirty minutes, water I doing here. You might also ask yourself what planet this Bible story takes place on because it doesn’t much resemble the Earth as we know it. Bible purists probably aren’t going to like it. The Muslims are being told not to see it. Atheists and skeptics will have a good chuckle wondering how any sane person could honestly believe this cockamamie story. And if the story of Noah, his ark and getting two of every animal species on it was not unbelievable enough, director Darren Aronofsky throws in some alien fallen angels that look like a cross between transformers and those rock critters from Galaxy Quest. At least they have cool glowing eyes.

Noah is some weird mixture of science fiction and fantasy, on some parallel Earth perhaps. This presentation should be enough to keep both devout and skeptic away. It is all done with such ponderous seriousness that you feel kind of guilty if you think the whole thing is really quite goofy. After a while you might react like I did which was, What the heck, I paid $10 to see this movie, so I might as well get my money’s worth and Just how did they convince Russell Crowe to play Noah? (Likely they waved a lot of money under his nose.)

Skeptics like me believe most Bible stories are myths anyhow, which makes it all the more puzzling that so many Christians believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God. There are a lot of myths to choose from in the Bible, including the preposterous story of Jonah, but the Noah myth also refuses to die too. Christians though are likely to have a hard time with this interpretation. It goes far afield from anything in the Bible and leaves you with so many questions. For example, at the start of the movie the earth is pretty much a barren place: no water, no plant life to speak of, the descendants of Cain pretty much rule the known world, and yet the scrappy Noah, his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and his various offspring and adopted offspring (including Emma Watson as Ila and Logan Lerman as Ham) somehow get by, wear clothing, find food to eat in a barren world (what are they eating, the lichen?) and somehow drink tea too.

The earth sure is an ugly place, but since it is occupied mostly by Cain’s descendants, it sort of fits, because they are a wicked lot, so wicked they’ve developed some decent technology, not bad for 10,000 B.C. or so. Noah and his small family are pretty much what’s left of the good side of Adam and Eve’s extended family. It’s amazing they survived with all the marauding brigands running around. No wonder with all the stress that Noah is getting visions: the Creator is warning of catastrophic floods and wants him to build an ark to keep the animals safe until the evil can literally be washed away. It’s time for Man, Version 2 and that’s Noah and his family, except Noah seems to get his signals crossed. At least this is true once his ark is afloat. Noah gets it in his head that they are not supposed to procreate either: Earth must be left to the innocent and sinless animals. And then his adopted daughter Ila, supposedly infertile due to belly wounds, gets pregnant. (And it must have been a fast pregnancy, because didn’t the voyage last just forty days and forty nights?) Noah becomes convinced that God is telling him to commit some infanticide once she delivers. It must have been PTSD from building that ark or something, because Noah is really at loose ends.

At least some things make a little sense. Those fallen angels sure are convenient, as is the seed given to him by his grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) from the Garden of Eden. The seed starts a convenient forest, which provides plenty of lumber to build his ark and the fallen angels provide a lot of grunt labor and help protect Noah and his family from the encroaching hordes of Cain, overseen by a “king”, Tubal-Cain played by Ray Winstone. Tubal-Cain sure adds some excitement because he becomes a stowaway on the ark somehow. Yeah, I know it’s not in the Bible, but artistic license is allowed, even with Bible stories. Noah’s direction by God to kill his grandchildren was left out too.

The result is that Noah is a WTF sort of cinematic experience, all so deadly serious but still sort of cartoonish and easy to lampoon. Most puzzling of all is how the producers sold investors on this preposterous interpretation. It must be doing well enough since it’s taken in $178M worldwide so far at a cost of $125M to produce. The question is: why? The acting is decent if not a bit over the top sometimes, the special effects are great but the story is, well, quite a head scratcher. At least we get an Old Testament God. This was the angry God before God Version 2 arrived in the New Testament, in new garments, and all universal and lovey dovey. I must say I like God Version 2 better.

Noah thus is best viewed for what it is: entertainment. The less you know about the Bible and his story the more you are likely to enjoy it. But your audience may be like ours: a handful of people who when the credits finally arrived were scratching their heads and wondering why we went to see this movie in the first place.

However, if you like mindless entertainment with lots of gaping plot holes and you take your Bible with a bit of science fiction (after all, Ezekiel saw the wheel, a UFO?) it might be worth your time. I suspect most of you will be like our audience: sheepishly walking out of the theater and hoping that no one we know saw us.

In short, Noah is a bit of a turkey of a movie, but a tasty one. 2.8 on my four-point scale.

[xrr rating=2.8/4]