Noah

by Robert Earl Houston

This is not going to be pretty.

This afternoon me and a few members of my church went to see the movie Noah. I had heard about the box office success it was enjoying and the counterweight – that the film’s director was an atheist, etc. So I decided to give it a try and draw my own conclusions.

It was horrible.

First, most people have a scattering of a notion of the real story. God has pronounced judgement upon the earth, He selects Noah and his family to survive the flooding of the earth. The Lord sends animals into the Ark, both male and female, of all living creatures. Noah and his family (including their sons) survive. Upon landing on shore, Noah gets drunk and his nakedness is seen by his son Ham while his other sons walk backwards to cover their father’s nakedness.

This cinematic train wreck is flawed in many of the major details:

1.  Why are all the characters talking in King James english? Russell Crowe and the cast all talk in their native tongues, but it is distracting and it’s almost a ploy to make it seem more biblical if it were written in old english.

2.  Maybe I’m weak on my Bible knowledge, but I don’t recall God sending angels to the earth and they become rock creatures. The last time I saw a rock creature was in “Galaxy Quest” and they were more believable because they didn’t talk. These “creatures” talk gibberish and it doesn’t make sense that when they die they go back to heaven in a beam of light.

3.  I don’t remember Ham’s contempt for his father. Neither did Ham meet a women in one scene and then they were star-crossed lovers. Also, Noah cursed him after he discovered his father’s nakedness. This was like watching a bad father-son movie.

4.  Noah’s wife did a lot of talking especially in a culture that did not allowed that (early centuries).

5.  What really bugged me was the casting of Russell Crowe. He was more Maximus than Noah. His makeup and haircuts were distracting. He paces back and forth in the Ark (planning to kill his grandchildren – which made no sense whatsoever) like he’s about to enter the Gladiator ring and then at the end of the movie he’s mentally imbalanced. So let me get this right, according to the movie, Noah figured that God wanted to save the animals but not human beings? So, why didn’t the Lord use animals to build the ark instead of the rock creatures???

6.  There was a theme that somehow his grandfather and himself carried the Harry Potter gene and had superpowers, i.e. like the Heroes TV show from years ago. I don’t recall Methuselah was ever known for anything and that he had a berry fetish.

7. I’m surprised and maybe I wasn’t notified – but if this all occurred in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, it was a pretty pale cast. I don’t recall seeing one dark or darker face. It looked like the flood happened in Europe – but I do think that the after-flood scenes were partially filmed on the Oregon coast.

8.  The special effects were better than the film. The film director envisioned that the animals loaded up on the ark and went into some kind of instant hibernation, which was weird because they were in hibernation throughout the ship and Noah asks his son, “Did you wake them?”  Huh????

9.  A stowaway on the ark and it’s Tubal-cain? I was an active 32nd Degree Mason and when I heard him say he was a king, my memory reminded me that he was a mason who specialized in metalworks. He was never a king and didn’t have kingly aspirations or lead an army.

Bottom line – if you’re going, you need to have your theological stance straightened out before you walk in the door. You won’t hear the name “God” or “Jehovah” and it differs so much from the written text that you’ll wind up doing what several couples did around me – present a running critique of the movie as it was playing.

I hope Hollywood doesn’t think that just because we’re Christians that we’ll swallow whatever they present to us and support it. This is one movie I recommend NOT SEEING.