BRIEF REVIEW OF THE MOVIE "NOAH."
I have not seen a movie for decades. In the 1980s, I used to take my son Adam to a movie on Sunday afternoons, following the Divine Liturgy. We usually went to a kung fu flick, although Adam suffered through Passage to India and Driving Miss Daisy with me.
Going to see a movie this evening took some build up — the lure of the movie house popcorn mostly. I had, however, been asked to review the new movie NOAH, a rough take-off on the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark. The popcorn was a great deal better than the movie. Nevertheless, many of the more harsh complaints about the movie missed the positive message near the end of it.
People point out that this cinema does not carefully follow the Scriptural summary of the Gilgamish Epic — the source of the Noah story. They are correct up to a point. The human race in general is portrayed as drop-outs from Mordor, and the use of some early Gnostic writings such as the Book of Enoch introduces the Watchers, spirits which, in classic Gnostic fashion have been cast down into material bodies.
Indeed, the version of the creation narrative given by Noah in the movie is actually sound and is a very good offering of a unity between religion and modern science. The solution to the maintenance and feeding of the animals on the ark is also handled in an imaginative way that resolves one of the great problems that arises from the biblical narrative: the animals are all simply put to sleep for the duration of voyage.
Moreover, the Creator is referred to directly and in a manner that does not contradict the Bible at all. It was irritating that Ham and Japeth were without wives and there were only six people on the ark, but lets get to two points which many critics seem to be missing; well, perhaps three. One evil leader manages to sneak aboard the ark before it is fully afloat. He is a tempter, and kind of “satan” the tempter, adversary and deceiver who tempts Noah’s son Ham.
Also, the evil king who declared "I am not afraid of miracles" would be echoed by the scribes and Pharisees during Christ's own ministry. This is another reason why I say that the Fundamentalist hysteria is misplaced.
Secondly, Noah is put to a test similar to that of Abraham. He believes that God intends to destroy all of mankind forever, and that Shem and his wife should not bear a child. When Shem’s wife becomes pregnant, Noah declares that if the baby is a boy it will be allowed to live so that it can bury the rest of the family when they die, and the boy would not be able to procreate. If the baby is a girl, however, it must be killed because she could become pregnant and re-start the human race. When Shem’s wife produces twin girls, Noah resolves to kill them. He believes that this is God’s will and desire, and he will follow it blindly, with blind faith, even if it means killing his own infant granddaughters.
At the critical moment, as he prepares to slay the infants, he is overcome with love and compassion, the very aspects that make the human race worth saving. He backs out of killing the infants, and then discovers that this was what God’s will actually was. He had been put to the test by his own legalism and blind faith, and in the end passed the test.
God’s actual will is that man should be dominated by love and compassion, and that these qualities make up the image and likeness of God in man. This, and the fact that man really is worth saving, and really is capable of these godly qualities, is the ultimate and most important statement in an otherwise uninteresting, poorly scripted and sometimes silly, movie.
I love the final conclusion, which in a way negates the more extreme attacks on this flick. But I would not recommend that anyone waste their money on a ticket — unless you have a thing for movie house popcorn.
Now, I went a second time, with my friend Andrei. I came away with a still stronger sense that the Fundamentalist/rightwing criticisms of the movie are completely unfounded. God is not disparaged at all in the movie; the events are true to the essential details of the Scriptural account. The story is originally Sumerian, retold in Hebrew with Semitic cultural aspects.
Noah is depicted as a man who starts off obeying God's instruction, but then falls into a fanaticism, and in his fanaticism and extremism, he no longer is following God's will, but the delusion of his own ego which is swallowed up in his fanaticism. In the end, he is redeemed by being move to love and compassion.
Perhaps this is the whole message of the movie Noah -- and might explain why so many Fundamentalists hate the movie.
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