 |
| Look out! God's coming! And he's meaner than Godzilla! |
The storyteller telling the Noah story faces this serious
challenge: how to make the protagonist sympathetic. This is a bigger challenge
than explaining the logistics: How one man and his family were able to build an
ark capacious enough to accommodate all species on earth and sturdy enough to
withstand a flood; how rain could fall hard enough to flood the entire planet;
how to feed all those creatures and eliminate their waste products. I've worked
with animals and mucking out five stalls every morning was, well, Herculean.
No, the bigger challenge is how to get the audience to
sympathize with God, the real protagonist of the story (Noah is just God's
tool). The God of the Noah story is all too much like the Pagan divinities of
ancient Greece: petulant, fickle, and not all that bright. God creates mankind
and loves mankind, but then God turns on mankind, eager to wipe out mankind.
God preserves some humans, but among the humans God preserves is Ham, who is
accused of "seeing his father naked," which some take to mean that he
humiliated, castrated, or perhaps sodomized Noah. In other words, the remnant
this God saved is not any better than the masses God drowned. Duh.
I was looking forward to Darren Aronofsky's
"Noah" not only for the special effects flood and animals, but also because
I wanted to see how Aronofsky would justify his God.
What would be the great evil that Aronofsky would attribute
to humanity? Why did we deserve to be wiped out? If this were Cecil B. DeMille,
our sin would certainly be sex. Sex sells tickets and entertains audiences. A swaggering,
bare chested Yul Brynner married to the very hot Anne Baxter deserved God's
smiting!
Aronofsky assigns a much more prosaic sin to humanity: environmental
destruction. Noah, Aronfsky's hero, subsists on lichens. This is ridiculous; no
one gets to be as beefy as Russell Crowe by eating lichens only. (Jennifer
Connelly, Noah's wife, is quite thin and I can believe that she eats nothing
but lichens.) The rest of mankind hunts animals, eats meat and mines minerals.
Also humans chop down a lot of trees.
Tubal Cain, the king of the bad humans, is a miner. There
is a scene where Noah walks through a blasted wasteland of tree stumps. Think
of that the next time you use toilet paper, made from trees!!! Also, humans are
shown eating flesh ripped from a living animal. People also engage in much
violence, and there is a smudgy rape scene. The sin that gets the most
attention, though, is environmental destruction.
"Noah"'s greatest strength, for me, was its
seriousness. The God of "Noah" is a badass God who gets very, very
angry and takes no prisoners. He is a mythic, superhero God who supplies his
chosen with "Watchers," giants made out of stone who have glowing,
fiery eyes. Darren Aronofsky is a self-described atheist, but he has put a
Godzilla divinity onscreen. This God is not New Age. He is not touchy feely. He
is not singing Kumbaya. There is such a thing as sin, and if you sin, Godzilla's
foot squashes you.
The angry God and sin part of "Noah" surprised
me and gripped me. The scenes of humans clinging to rocks and howling as they
drowned were powerful and frightening. I would not bring a small child to this
movie.
The rest of the movie was only so-so. The special effects
were meh. The animals are all CGI; Aronofsky has said that he does not believe in
working with real animals, presumably because it discomfits the animals. A
lover of good animal footage would get much more enjoyment out of watching any
given animal video on youtube than from "Noah." The flood was okay.
The stone giant Watchers were interesting at first but quickly became
semi-comical. The second half of the movie revolves around a couple of
non-Biblical subplots – a stowaway on the ark, and Noah becoming obsessed with
killing someone – and those did not grab my interest.
Thanks for the review Danusha. I certainly have no need to watch it now. It is such a compelling story too,as Genesis tells it. I have often thought about it, and hope that, one day, IF I am in the restored earthly Paradise, I will be able to talk to Noah. I especially want to ask about that moment when Jehovah closed the door of the Ark. It sends chills down my spine to think about it.
ReplyDeleteSo the Nephilim have become Watchers in the movie. I wonder why.
Genesis says that they were very much involved in nearly bringing the earth to ruin through their brutality and violence. They were the offspring of angels, who followed Satan, and forsook their true place,and the daughters of Eve, who they took in marriage. And they were terrifying.
"Now it came about that when men started to grow in numbers on the surface of the ground and daughters were born to them, then the sons of the [true] God began to notice the daughters of men, that they were good-looking; and they went taking wives for themselves, namely, all whom they chose. After that Jehovah said: “My spirit shall not act toward man indefinitely in that he is also flesh. Accordingly his days shall amount to a hundred and twenty years.”
The Neph′i‧lim proved to be in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of the [true] God continued to have relations with the daughters of men and they bore sons to them, they were the mighty ones who were of old, the men of fame.
Consequently Jehovah saw that the badness of man was abundant in the earth and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only bad all the time. And Jehovah felt regrets that he had made men in the earth, and he felt hurt at his heart. So Jehovah said: “I am going to wipe men whom I have created off the surface of the ground, from man to domestic animal, to moving animal and to flying creature of the heavens, because I do regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of Jehovah.