A film that stole the famous Noah’s Ark story from the bible, yet not holy enough for the characters to make references to ‘GOD’ or even the ‘LORD’. The ‘CREATOR’ is a more favourable language than GOD in Noah.
The film begins exhausting the montage editing famously used by Einstein to express the passage of time of the creation procession. It only took five seconds to narrate Genesis 1-6, from the creation of Adam to the slaying of Abel by Cain, to the wickedness done by man on Earth. The opening lines were ‘In the beginning there was nothing’; we are shown an image of a snake crawling. Then, with the second line, ‘Temptation led to sin’; we are shown a red apple from a tree. The use of montage in Noah conveys a sense of the darkness that prevailed in the world in that era. Montage is a powerful editing technique to tell a story. In my opinion, Noah’s director, Darren Aronofsky, and his team have done a marvellous job with their skilful editing.
After an enticing opening, we meet Russell Crowe as Noah, his wife Naamah and their three sons. In search of answer to his flooding nightmare, Noah and his family head up into the mountains to visit great-grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins). Methuselah is an unkempt hermit with magical powers able to make Noah’s barren stepdaughter, Ila (Emma Watson), fall pregnant. The harsh reality of the everyday life of Noah and his family becomes immediate when they embark on this journey. We see the severe weather and depressed landscape caused by the lack of rain.
It was an ugly world with nothing beautiful worth saving apart from the animals and Noah’s family. Noah and his family ended up in a forbidden desert after being chased by a group of barbaric men. In this outlandish desert they were captured by rocky giants called The Watchers, meant to be fallen angels. The appearance of these rocky giants bears a similarity to the robotic characters from the film Transformers. The angels quickly saw an opportunity to save their grace by helping Noah to build the ark. With the use of transformer looking angels and a magical old man are factors that suggest that this adaption of Noah is somewhere between biblical and magical.
So who is the CREATOR? When Noah’s eldest son asked him why the brigands wanted to eat the dying animal he saved, his answer was, ‘They thought it will make them stronger…but strength comes from the creator’. Eating meat was depicted as an unholy act left for Cain’s descendants. In an earlier scene, Noah’s dad had told him that it was the creator that created Adam from his own image. In contrast to the lack of references to ‘God’ in the film, the bible (Genesis 1:27) reads ‘God created man in his own image’. God is being replaced by the ‘CREATOR’ in this film, we are led to believe. Though, could this be the truth? Is the Creator something else other than God, a higher being for instance? So, who is this creator in Aronofsky’s Noah film adaption?
