Whatever floats your boat: two Catholic critics on “Noah”

Last updated on: September 30, 2016 at 3:56 pm by Deacon Greg Kandra

Whatever floats your boat: two Catholic critics on “Noah” 2016-09-30T15:56:58-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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From Steven Greydanus at National Catholic Register:

It is not a “Bible movie” in the usual sense, with all the story beats predetermined by the text, and actors in ancient Near Eastern couture hitting their marks and saying all the expected things. It is something more vital, surprising and confounding: a work of art and imagination that makes this most familiar of tales strange and new: at times illuminating the text, at times stretching it to the breaking point, at times inviting cross-examination and critique.

For many pious moviegoers, I suspect some of the film’s more provocative flourishes will be a bridge too far. Less pious viewers, meanwhile, may be put off by the biblical subject matter. Have Aronofsky (raised with a Jewish education) and co-writer Ari Handel made a film that’s too religious for secular viewers and too secular for religious ones? Who is the audience?

Well, I am, to begin with. For a lifelong Bible geek and lover of movie-making and storytelling like me, Noah is a rare gift: a blend of epic spectacle, startling character drama and creative reworking of Scripture and other ancient Jewish and rabbinic writings. It’s a movie with much to look at, much to think about and much to feel; a movie to argue about, and argue with…

…The work of an uncompromising filmmaker who makes dark, divisive, personal films without concession to audience expectations, it’s an outlier for the genre, to be sure. It’s not often that a movie with giant rock monsters has me pondering ancient and modern cosmologies, rabbinic literature and Tolkien — and also makes me cry.

And Barbara Nicolosi at Patheos:

Noah is a terrible, terrible movie. I kept thinking all through, “Wow. The secular critics hate Christians this much. They hate the Christians so much, that they will rave about this piece of crap because they think the Christians are going to hate it for ideological reasons.” And the Christian critics? Well, too many have been all balled up in the throes of self-loathing for at least a decade, which leads them to depths of self-contradiction in their popular culture appraisals that never seems to have a bottom. As soon as the momentum around this picture as offensive Scripturally began to go – and it is clear that this was generated intentionally by the studio and PR people promoting Noah – the Christians felt themselves double-dared to show themselves “enlightened” enough to embrace the movie even as it spits in their eye in every way – as an adaptation of Scripture, as a work of cinema, and as a plain old story. Remember when so many Christians felt the need to embrace the neo-porn mess, The Master? I remember one guy insisting that it was the best film of the decade. It wasn’t. It was an offensive, puerile mess. And remember when we were all told to go see The Da Vinci Code to promote “dialogue.” What a crock! In this case, the insane need to embrace modern sewage has the critics swallowing huge, gargantuan portions of ROCK PEOPLE!

Where was I? Oh yes, Noah is a terrible, terrible movie. As a story, it doesn’t attain to the level of the worst of the cheesy Biblical movies made in the fifties. Aronofsky broke the first and sacred rule of storytelling: you have to make the audience care. We never cared about Noah even after he was kind to a wounded, half dog – half snake. (No, that wasn’t a mistake.) We never cared for any of the characters. I kept hearing people say this movie is deep. It isn’t. It is psychologically pedestrian. The only emotion the movie elicited in me was laughs of scorn. The script is problematic in every way in which a script can be problematic. Bad characterizations – no complex personalities, just stereotypes. Unmotivated choices abound. No imagery or story subtext. Huge story problems requiring ark-sized suspension of disbelief. Earnest, oh so earnest, dialogue with every syllable on-the-tedious-nose. Awkward transitions. Completely missing a coherent theme. Embarrassing soap-operaish holds on actors looking tense or worried or just staring ahead trying to convey lostness and doubt. And the fakest, funniest looking, plastic green snake used repeatedly to indicate badness.

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