{"id":585,"date":"2014-03-31T09:37:23","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T16:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=585"},"modified":"2014-04-01T10:21:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T17:21:22","slug":"noah-fair-to-middling-with-a-chance-of-showers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2014\/03\/31\/noah-fair-to-middling-with-a-chance-of-showers\/","title":{"rendered":"Noah: Fair to Middling, with a Chance of Showers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"noahposter\"<\/a>So I went to the movies, and saw Noah<\/i>.\u00a0 Apparently Noah’s pre-flood Earth is the sort of thing you’d get if Sauron got the ring back from Frodo: all Mordor, no Shire.\u00a0 The bad guys are the numerous descendants of the first murderer, Cain, who went forth and multiplied big-time; the good guys are the pathetic remnants of Seth’s line, just Noah and his little family, plus granddaddy Methusaleh, who doesn’t even get invited onto the Ark.\u00a0 Plus God, of course, though God gets no lines at all.\u00a0 Then there are bad-guys-turned-good-guys, the Fallen Angels (aka Watchers), great golems of rock formed when the rebel hosts hit the ground like a rain of meteors, back in Adam’s day.\u00a0 These look exactly like Ents plastered with large gobs of dried mud, and seem to suffer from severe arthritis.<\/p>\n

I really wanted to like this movie, if only because Ken Ham hated it.\u00a0 Well, I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it much, either.\u00a0 The first half was reasonably entertaining; the second half, unfortunately, got bogged down in ludicrously ill-conceived plot complications, including an entirely gratuitous moral dilemma for Noah.\u00a0 It’s as if the movie could not quite decide whether it was a biblical epic, a bog-standard fantasy, or a moving philosophical exploration of…something or other.<\/p>\n

Therefore, between the bouts of decent but too-brief CGI, I passed the time spotting creationist shout-outs on one hand, and departures from scripture on the other, the bits that are getting the fundies all upset.\u00a0 In fact, it looked to me as if the scriptwriters had done their homework as far as creationist literature goes, presenting ingenious solutions to the fairy-tale implausibilities of Genesis.<\/p>\n

For example, how do Noah and his little family build so vast a ship on their own?\u00a0 They don’t have to.\u00a0 They have the help of the fallen angels.\u00a0 How does Noah gather the animals?\u00a0 He doesn’t have to.\u00a0 They swarm to the Ark of their own accord, lured along rivulets of magic water.\u00a0 How does Noah keep the animals fed and watered for a year?\u00a0 He doesn’t have to.\u00a0 They sleep the entire trip away.\u00a0 How do the animals get to the Ark from the other continents?\u00a0 They don’t have to.\u00a0 A shot of antediluvian Earth from space shows a single large continent, Pangaea-style, just as the YEC\/Flood Geologists believe.\u00a0 Though, of course, that does not explain how the animals manage to get back.<\/i>\u00a0 Perhaps postdiluvian kangaroos were very good swimmers.<\/p>\n

There is one short segment that may particularly bother the YE creationists: a montage of Creation itself, flashing past while Noah tells the story in voice-over, over dinner on the Ark.\u00a0 The montage does not follow the order of creation as Genesis presents it – somehow, Genesis has plants created before the sun, so screw <\/i>photosynthesis – \u00a0but what follows then is basically a cool imaging of theistic evolution<\/i>, with a critter morphing prettily through the phyla in roughly the right order.<\/p>\n

In terms of eye candy, the movie is gorgeous, but not groundbreaking.\u00a0 Iceland looks cool.\u00a0 The morphing sequences are cool.\u00a0 I like the shout to Bosch in the wicked village, and the salute to Dor\u00e9’s image of doomed sinners on a wave-washed mountaintop. \u00a0\u00a0The CGIs of creepy-crawlies and landbeasts flooding towards the Ark are also cool – but gone in a flash.\u00a0 And\u00a0 Tubal-Cain’s attack on the Ark might as well have been the battle of Isengard, right down to Ents, orcs, rickety scaffolding, and rushing waters.\u00a0 Ho hum.<\/p>\n

\"noaharkj2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then there’s the somewhat ham-fisted environmental message: again, Mordor versus the Shire.\u00a0 In Aronofsky’s rendering, mankind’s extinction-worthy crime has nothing to do with sex with the Nephilim or general wickedness, and everything to do with wrecking the environment.\u00a0 The descendants of Cain have built an industrial civilization, complete with strip mining, smoking cities, proto-cannons, and – yes – welding masks.\u00a0 The descendants of Seth are hippies. No contest in the wickedness stakes.<\/p>\n

God is never directly heard from. He does not issue Noah all those detailed instructions<\/a> for the Ark. He gives Noah no guidance in his moral dilemma – though I suppose, \u00a0\u00a0given the fact that He had just massacred the human race and most of the animals, the Almighty was leading by example. \u00a0Even Tubal-Cain, bad-guy-in-chief, complains that God never writes and never calls.\u00a0 Apparently God only communicates through dreams, hallucinogenic substances, and weather phenomena, including bizarre rainbows blown like smoke rings from God’s celestial hookah. Modern-day hippies, take note.<\/p>\n

Overall, I’d grade Noah<\/i> as a \u00a0C; though I’d be tempted to bump it up to C+ on the strength of Noah getting shitface-drunk and nekkid after the Ark lands.\u00a0 Now that<\/i> scene, at least, was biblically accurate.<\/p>\n

Addendum: \u00a0Dr. Brian Mattson has provided a brilliant explication of the clever use of extra-biblical \u00a0motifs in the movie Noah – see\u00a0http:\/\/drbrianmattson.com\/journal\/2014\/3\/31\/sympathy-for-the-devil \u00a0 \u00a0Zowie. \u00a0I may have to rethink my rating. \u00a0(With thanks to Clarence at the ‘Pit, who posted the link.)<\/p>\n

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So I went to the movies, and saw Noah.\u00a0 Apparently Noah’s pre-flood Earth is the sort of thing you’d get…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}