"The Creator formed us on the second day. The day he made the heavens. We watched over Adam and Eve. Saw their frailty and their love. And then we saw their fall. And we pitied them."
--Watcher guide, Noah
"The wickedness is not just in them. It's in all of us."
--Noah, Noah
"I am a man. Made in Your image. Why will You not converse with me? I give life. I take life away. As You do! And I am like You, am I not? Speak to me."
--Tubal-cain, Noah
Noah rises far above most films based on the Bible thanks to abnormally high ambition and production values for a project like this, and one helmed by a non-Christian. Christians I was surrounded by in 2014, when I was not even yet out of high school and soon to be a rationalist, were so damn focused on the differences between the events of the film and the Genesis account that they overlooked the significance of an atheist director taking theological ideas very seriously, and crucial issues like the character of the Judeo-Christian Yahweh, the sin of injustice, and the capacity for redemption at that. Noah is not crafted as an exact adaptation of Genesis 6-7, but as an artistic homage to a story of extreme renown that does not try to neglect the very deep philosophical matters the text deals with. As that, it succeeds entirely, and it is even accurate to the Biblical story in ways that could esily go unnoticed. It also touches upon things like the humanity of the unborn and the sin of systematically, gratuitously destroying the environment that God created--things that are very Biblical and far from politically correct, given how many conservative and liberal Christians misunderstand or selectively ignore the true contents of the Bible. Like plenty of non-Christian entertainment, here is something that, while philosophically flawed in some of its themes, is at least addressing things of far greater substance than almost the whole of Christian-produced cinematic art.
Production Values
Noah has plenty of aesthetically striking or well-handled shots, including an early silhouette of Noah and his wife Naamah, the desolation in Noah's precognitive dreams of the flood, and a close view of a Watcher's face with its glowing eye as the rain falls. Scenes such as the assault on the ark by desperate followers of Tubal-Cain channel an artistic competency that is simply not seen in most films based on the Bible besides The Passion of the Christ, and it helps that this film actually has a budget that can support much of what the creators tried to accomplish. All of its strong cinematography is secondary to the very human drama pertaining to Noah, his family, and the largely cruel descendants of Cain who serve as the human antagonists. Noah reunites Jennifer Connelly and Russell Crowe, who had already started together to great effects in A Beautiful Mind. As the titular character, Crowe deservedly gets the most attention, wonderfully expressing the conflicted devotion of a person who longs for justice and yet confuses subjective perceptions as confirmation of what is just.
Jeniffer Conelly gets less of a focus, but she, too, is a great fit for her role as she supports and then eventually pushes back against Noah once he assumes that God wants all humans eliminated. Emma Watson as Shem's wife Ila and Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah also stand out among the ensemble cast. Then there is Ray Winstone (Beowulf, Black Widow) as Tubal-cain, an arrogant ruler whose people are literally starving because they have so thoroughly used up the animals and minerals around them that their civilization. His smaller screentime as compared with Crowe's is not wasted. In particular, moments like his bitter prayer to God as the flood rains begin, where he asks God why there is silence between them (when in the context of the film, as well as Christian theology itself, it is clear that it is his evil that separates them), do much to establish his worldview, motivations, and personality.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
After Adam and Eve poisoned Eden and their son Cain murdered his brother Abel, Cain retreated to live among the Watchers, fallen angels God confined to stone bodies on Earth after they gave aid to the first humans. The Watchers helped Cain and his descendents pioneer an industrial civilization as wicked as it is mechanically advanced, practicing murder and environmental exploitation until it turns against the very angels that helped it develop. It is a leader of this society that eventually kills Noah's father Lamech. Noah lives on to have a family of his own and live in respect of nature and fellow humans as the cruelty and selfishness of Cain's descendants does not stop. A sudden apocalyptic dream spurs him to visit his grandfather Methuselah, with his family discovering a girl named Ila who outlived the slaughter of her family along the way. With a special item given by Methusaleh and Watchers who are willing to do the will of the Creator despite their curse, Noah constructs a massive boat to ride out the flood he has foreseen.
Intellectual Content
In Noah, not a single character denies that God exists, calling him the Creator. The villainous Tubal-cain resents God for the curse that humans must labor to survive. The Watchers have some among them who look down on humans for betraying the Creator despite they themselves betraying God, hence their banishment to the stone forms on Earth. Noah and his family strive to obey God. With the human characters, the story takes this practically universal acknowledgment of the Creator and has its lead protagonist Noah and lead antagonist Tubal-cain each mistakenly distort something relating to this. Noah misunderstands the idea of caring for the animals of creation (which is necessarily part of the commandment of Genesis 1 to steward the environment, which, like humans, is something God said is "very good") to the point of wanting to preserve animals, which are not made in God's image, over the higher animal of humankind, while Tubal-cain echoes the statement of Genesis that humans are to take dominion over the rest of creation, yet he erroneously thinks it follows from this that animals and the planet's resources are to be exploited at his whim. The two serve as ironic mirrors of each other, taking an element of something that is posited as true in Genesis and then ignoring its true ramifications. They both make assumptions or ignore the truth, and both suffer significant consequences for it.
Regardless, some of their ideas are distinctly Biblical, such as aspects of Noah's environmentalism. "We can only collect what we can use and what we need," he insists, never refusing to use land and plants for the sake of human wellbeing and yet opposing the ruthless, selfish destruction of the environment by the likes of Tubal-cain. Ironically, it requires a great amount of wood to construct the ark, but there was a way provided by Methuselah for Noah to have all of the wood he needed despite other people having ravaged so much of the landscape. One place where Noah does go beyond the actual dictates of the Biblical Yahweh is in how he talks as if eating meat is itself a sin--not eating blood with meat, or torturing animals to death and then eating their meat, or eating the meat of the prohibited creatures that were only specified in the life of Moses after the flood, but eating any sort of meat. He says the descendants of Cain eat meat because they think it makes them stronger, implying that this is a scientifically false belief they think justifies something immoral, but the deity of the Torah never condemns eating meat even in the dietary laws of Leviticus. At the same time, abusing animals or dismissing them as totally meaningless is contra-Biblical, and the descendants of Cain are for the most part portrayed as apathetic to everything but their own whims and survival, trivializing what God created and contributing to their own misery by needlessly pillaging Earth. Their utter desperation before the flood is in part simply because they have so stripped the land of resources that they cannot sustain their own population.
Not every point Noah makes about sin is about the desecration of the natural world, though. Sinful violence against humans is included in the moral offenses the film repeatedly touches upon, with murder being directly addressed and rape being implied to be one of the sins of Tubal-cain and his kind. Noah still realizes that every person has the power to descend into cruelty and selfishness when he secretly enters Tubal-cain's camp and sees a doppelganger of himself. It is at this point that he assumes God must want all humans to perish instead of letting the ark preserve the best of humanity to start again. Noah says he wants justice, only to raise a blade against two newborn babies who have not yet sinned as he confuses the potential to sin for proof that someone deserves death. The capacity for sin is not the same thing as sin itself, however; just because a person can sin does not mean that they will, and there is not a single sin that anyone cannot avoid committing. In Noah's assumption-based response to the savagery of other people, he even gets his wife to admit that she would kill to protect their children and says this is evil despite him later killing to protect the ark from attackers. That Noah seems to think all killing is sinful is actually a far more significant deviation from Biblical philosophy than anything involving the Watchers or Tubal-cain being aboard the ark, yet what do the conservative evangelicals tend to focus on? Not the most fundamental themes of the movie! What even they should more easily undertand, though, is that after trying to kill his baby granddaughters while assuming God wants him to end humanity, Noah says all he felt towards Ila's daughters was love when he raised the knife--it is plain that this parallels, to some extent (the Bible does repeatedly say that God does hate some people), God's experience as he sees and foresees how humans will all fall short of his moral nature and yet metaphorically offers his hand. As Biblically inaccurate as the rest of their beliefs about this are, at least evangelicals are quick to affirm that the Christian deity loves even fallen creatures like humans.
Lastly, but more foundationally than anything else in the film, Noah makes a major philosophical mistake when retelling the creation story to his family on the ark, a mistake whether or not the Bible is actually true. He says that before the Creator brought the waters, landscapes, celestial bodies, and living beings of the universe into existence, "there was nothing," and yet Noah says the Creator was there. Not only is this impossible if God was already present before the universe since God is something (and he would have to be as the uncaused cause), but it would also be impossible for another deeper reason. That there was once nothing physical does not mean only God existed prior to the creation of the physical world, of angels, or of mind-body composites like humans. The laws of logic, as necessary truths, and even the empty space that now holds matter would have to exist by logical necessity, though only the laws of logic exist without being confined or dictated by something else: even empty or filled space alike can only exist if this is logically possible, and space only must exist because it is logically impossible for the absence of matter to mean the absence of that which could hold matter. Empty space is only unique as the only thing besides logic to exist by necessity, but only because it hinges on logic, and is only significant beyond that for its capacity to hold a material cosmos, but nothing is true at all without the logical axioms that could not not be true and thus cannot not exist. Not even God could change a necessary truth like this, but the Bible in no way denies this grand metaphysical truth about the most fundamental parts of reality and some of its most precise ramifications.
Conclusion
Without even perfectly reflecting the philosophical stances of the book it is based on, Noah sets an example for how Biblical films need to be made. Unfortunately, after Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings released in 2014, there has not been another such movie made by Christians or non-Christians. The closest thing to a mainstream movie with Biblical themes since then would be Alien: Covenant, Wonder Woman, or other Zack Snyder-affiliated DCEU films, all of which do ironically explore genuinely Biblical themes far better than almost every Christian movie made by Christians--yes, exceptions like The Passion of the Christ are there, and Christian directors like Scott Derrickson can make secular movies like Doctor Strange that do share ideas with the Bible (in this case, the emphasis on substance dualism and humility). There is nothing logically impossible about making excellent Christian movies! It takes far more philosophical authenticity, artistic competence, and financial resources to make one these than many Christian filmmakers are willing to muster. That aside, it is still deeply paradoxical that the atheist Darren Aronofsky would be fixated enough on a Biblical story that most non-Christians would despise for its handling of sin. Any intelligent, sincere Christian would welcome films like Noah no matter who they come from.
Content:
1. Violence: Blood is seen in some of the scenes where people attack or kill each other.
2. Nudity: As described in Genesis 9, Noah is found naked after he descends into drunkenness once he leaves the ark, but he is seen resting on his stomach withotu clothing far from the camera.
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