The Movie “Noah” – Sink or Float?

 Hello everyone, it’s been too long a time for me to be gone. I am back and now I am here  to talk about the latest biblical epic movie, Noah. Be prepared to stay a while as I have a lot to say.

First, before we begin, let’s have a disclaimer. This post has nothing to do with the biblical inaccuracies made in the movie. While I was at first scratching my head at the “Watchers” thing, I was willing to accept it if there was some substance emphasizing the theme of the story. Also, the support of theistic evolution in this movie is a discussion all to itself and won’t be brought up in this review. With that said, here’s the review.

Let’s talk about what is good with the movie. The first thing I liked about this movie is the acting. Russell Crowe does very well at portraying the titular character. Honestly, after seeing Gladiator, I think that he was born to play biblical characters. He does what he needs to do for the role and never sucks the focus of the camera unnecessarily.

Emma Watson does a good job playing Shem’s wife, Ela. I don’t think it’s very easy to play the role of the girl who is supposed to be barren, but Emma does good with the role. Again, like Crowe, she shares the screen with the other characters and never takes the focus when it’s not meant for her.

I also enjoyed the special effects in this movie. The Watchers, which are supposed to be giant rock monsters, look and move like giant rock monsters. They don’t move fluidly because of their rocky features. That’s a great idea and props for the CGI department for making the most out of something not in the Bible. Also, the effects with the Flood are awesome. Most of it is CGI, but the movie integrates splash effects with the CGI almost flawlessly. The ark is an interesting look at the boat. I was expecting something more like the one you’d see from Answers in Genesis and I don’t know how well this design would float, but it looks cool.

So this movie has good actors and is rather spectacular to look at, but does the story, direction, and substance in the film hold up as well? Not a chance. In fact aside from the acting and CGI, this movie contends as being part of my worst films of 2014.

The story breaks several principles to the craft, the characters are either laughable or too unlikable, and I can’t say too much for the cinematography.

Just to get cinematography out of the way, when will people learn that shaking the camera is NOT an effective means of creating tension in the movie? I know it’s utter amateur hour when the director gets the cameramen to shake the camera when there’s a dramatic conversation in a scene. For one, the audience cannot focus their eyes on anything, so we can’t pay attention to the conversation. Secondly, if shaking the camera is your way of creating tension between characters, then that means your characters are horribly written.

And horribly written characters are exactly what makes this movie unbearable for me. Let’s go character by character to show how dreadful the whole movie is.

First, let’s address the Watchers. Their backstory is this: When man fell from grace, a legion of angels wanted to go down to earth to help man Prometheus-style. They were told not to intervene in the affairs of men by God, but they came down to earth anyway. As punishment, they were forced to take on the earth and become rock-like monsters. They helped Cain build cities, but man eventually betrayed them and started killing them off. Therefore, they have a fear of men.

First of all, I haven’t seen anywhere in the Bible that would say God would punish you for intervening with men. In fact, God Himself divinely intervenes all of the time, so His actions seem completely arbitrary and cruel by where the story is going. Is the punishment ever explained? No, and the Watchers become completely underwhelming.

Throughout the movie, they serve no other function than an answer to say how Noah built the ark. You never grow attached to any one of them, so you never distinguish between them. Every time I saw them I asked why they never went into their subplot more.

At the end of the first story in this movie (there are two), we finally get back to their subplot, and it is so rushed that it’s laughable. SPOILER: Apparently because they helped Noah, God forgave them. You know, because God only forgives you if you work for it! So when they are killed (I was about to say massacred, but that’s a word the movie only dreams of receiving), they break from being rock monsters to become angels again. This had a theme going for it about fall from grace and forgiveness that could have emphasized what this movie should have been. Unfortunately, Darren Aronofsky fails to see this potentially great subplot theme and makes it unbiblical, ridiculous, and only serves as a plot-mover.

My award for most laughable character goes to Methuselah. I was laughing every time he was onscreen, but probably for the wrong reasons. He’s essentially a mystical sage who serves as healer and seed-provider for Noah. When we are introduced to him, he is alone against an entire army of men. So he does what any biblical hero does… He catches his sword on fire with his bare hands and incinerates the entire army LIKE A BOSS!!!!!!

Then he serves nothing more than help Emma Watson overcome her problem with being barren. He touches where her womb is and she’s cured. Is this explained? No. In fact miracles in this movie are treated as if they come from men rather than God. Once again, we waste an opportunity showing that God can overcome any adversity for men. This subplot once again is made as a way to keep the movie running rather than create meaningful messages or strong characters.

There’s also a running gag associated with Methuselah that’s so ridiculous and serves absolutely nothing to the character or plot, so I won’t talk about it at length.

Another problem is with Noah’s second son Ham and Nila, his girlfriend-ish wife. There’s this problem in the beginning that Ham has no wife unlike Shem, so he’s afraid that if he doesn’t find a wife before the Flood his line will not continue. So there’s something here, right? It sounds reasonable.

What does our loveless supporting character do? He whines and complains like any clichéd character until he runs into the enemy camp. Brilliant thinking…

Then he finds Nila there and decides that she’s not like the others. Does Nila have any character development or serve anything for the others? No, because by the next scene she’s dead. So we as the audience have wasted a solid three minutes of the film for a subplot that goes nowhere.

Then Ham starts hating his father, which I cannot complain about because I feel the same way, and there’s a contrived subplot in the second story of this movie of whether he’ll kill his father for the death of his one scene girlfriend or not. It involves the main antagonist of the movie as well, and we’ll get to him next. Then there’s a scene where Ham has to make a big decision of whether he’ll kill his father or the antagonist. Of course he kills the antagonist. That’s a shocker, right?

So does this mean that the conflict between Ham and Noah is fixed? Nope, because after the Flood Ham up and leaves Noah because he’s still mad at him. Therefore, the conflict is never resolved in this movie, meaning your time was utterly wasted.

Then there are the villains of the story. Apparently there’s some king who plays the main antagonist. What’s the connection and conflict between Noah and the king? The king killed Noah’s father. So unique… Now why did the king kill Noah’s father? For a snake skin. What’s the importance of the snake skin? Nothing, it’s absolutely worthless and has nothing to do with the plot.

That leads me to my next beef with this movie. Some mystical elements in this movie are never explained and have no significance in the story. There’s not much I can say about these elements because there is literally nothing to them.

Back to the villains. They are as weak as they come. The movie commits the story sin of telling us about these characters rather than showing them. That means that you hardly see the villains do anything evil in the movie. Aside from killing Noah’s father, which goes by so fast and is so silly it doesn’t count, the men of the world never do anything worse than killing and eating animals. Apparently, God’s a member of PETA…

Since the villains are weak, that means their punishment is so ridiculous and cruel that it makes Noah and God look villainous. And that is the worst sin this movie makes.

The two characters I hate the most in this movie are God and Noah. Noah basically tells the world that there’s no chance for anyone to live except himself. If I can recall from 2 Peter, Noah as a preacher of righteousness would have tried to save the world by inviting people to be forgiven and come aboard the ark. This theme, which should have been the main theme of this story like anything else in the Bible, is never seen. Like the Watchers and Emma Watson, it is stripped of all significance.

Then in the second story, Noah does something (or is about to do something) so evil that there is no way I can forgive him. He basically thinks that the only reason he was saved was to save the animals. “Man is not meant to live in the new world,” he thinks.

So when he hears that Emma Watson is pregnant, which should have made him ecstatic as it is a miracle performed by God (or, I’m sorry, Methuselah), he goes ballistic and swears he’ll kill the baby when it is born because “God ordains it.” This transforms the main protagonist of the movie into a religious maniac. You can’t decide whether this is right or wrong as you the audience member knows that this is wrong but yet you are expected to still empathize with the main character. This is How to Make a Bad Movie 101 here.

What does God have to say about the matter? Well, nothing really. In a movie where God is there to destroy everything, we get very little about Him. He never says anything even though in the Bible God has a lot to say about the Flood. We don’t get to know His character or give Him any semblance in the making of this movie’s theme. Like so many other characters, God is only there to pad the story out. We’re supposed to believe that Noah’s beliefs are in line with God’s judgments, so if you hate Noah, you have to hate God.

God has no say in the movie other than what Noah says, which, in paraphrase, consists of “Die! Humans are evil! They kill animals!”

I think this is what the movie is trying to say: The first half of the movie is an environmental message. First, the villains are evil because they create industrialized states, eat meat, and overconsume. Our heroes are therefore good because they don’t do any of those things. All they do is listen to God by getting drugged up, taking only what they need, and never pick flowers.

The second half leads to our despicable hero about to abort children out of religious extremism and it seems like God’s totally fine with infanticide. Everyone’s pouty and after each other’s blood. But God and Noah have an all too predictable change of heart and decide that they shouldn’t kill children.

Noah had the set-up to create a great story that mostly stayed true to the biblical text and themes that could easily have translated to universal feelings. It could have been like Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt, which told a great story that mostly stayed true to the text without necessarily needing to proselytize. Instead of this, it blows every opportunity it had by creating ridiculous themes, clichéd dialogue, predictable conflicts and outcomes, and characters that are laughable and/or despicable.

Its departures from the text are the least of its problems. Overall, it is just a shameful movie with all the spectacle but nothing of substance.

The worst I can see coming out of this is if many people look at Noah and God and feel about them like me. It would be worse because I know the true text and what really happens, but what about people whose only contact with the story of Noah is this? Would they feel compelled to read the Bible to know more? I highly doubt it.

If you want a good Bible movie that tells a strong story, creates great and memorable characters, and stays true to the themes of the text, watch The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt on Netflix. They’re far better than this lacking movie.

Noah definitely sinks.

~Jacob