Oh, I don't know that I'd go that far, Bill; but I, for one, would appreciate, you know, God in Bible movies - and I don't mean George Burns:
People expect to see literalism in Bible movies, says Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, so it isn't surprising there has been adverse reaction to Darren Aronofsky's blockbuster "Noah."
On his show Monday, O'Reilly noted that conservative talk show host Glenn Beck had called the movie "dangerous disinformation."
Raymond Arroyo, managing editor of EWTN News, told O'Reilly that he interviewed Aronofsky and the film's stars before the movie came out and nothing he was told prepared his audience for the film that appeared.
"They went to see 'Gladiator' in an ark. What they got was 'Black Swan's daddy in 'Waterworld," Arroyo said. The film is a dark depiction and deviates from the Bible story, or the "popular perception of it," he said. "And I think that's rattled audiences."
Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper countered that "Noah" is a big-budget picture that has to have a lot of elements to succeed, including the stone giants who protect Noah and help him build the ark.
"If you're just going to show Noah as this kindly old 550-year-old man who leads all the animals onto the ark and then it rains for 40 days, well that's a 10-minute cartoon, and that's been done before," Roeper said. "Of course it deviates from the text. So does almost every single Hollywood fictional movie ever made that's been based on anything."
Actually, Mr. Arroyo, it depends; if moviegoers were going to see Russell Crowe, then yes, they might have thought they were going to see Gladiator in an ark. If, however, they were going to see Noah, then what they got instead was 2012 with an ark (Hell, the son of John Kusack's Jackson Curtis character is named Noah, for crying out loud).
As for you, Mr. Roeper, you display your ignorance of the Genesis account if you think that the epic Noahic Deluge event as it actually happened would be a ten-minute cartoon. In fact, there's all kinds of room for human drama, action, special effects, depraved sex, and high adventure - if the plot had focused more on what happened to Noah and his family after the Flood. That's something 2012 never did; that was all the buildup to the disaster, following the discovery of the impending cataclysm, watching famous landmarks get destroyed, seeing which characters survived and which perished, and the disaster hits, and that's it. We never saw what happened to the survivors thereafter. Here was an opportunity to tell that story based on the actual biblical historical account.
But....no. Instead we got 2012 with an ark. Because Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel wanted to twist and distort and frankly rip apart the actual Genesis account.
Now please understand that I have no problem adding interesting things that fill in the gaps, such as the skin of the original serpent from the Garden of Eden being passed down from patriarch to patriarch. Genesis doesn't mention that, but you could see it happening - who knows, maybe it did. It's consistent with the story. And fortunately, they didn't make it into a bigger plot point - Noah holds up the serpent's skin and stops the flood or something similar (besides, that was Moses' gimmick).
I guess we're given a glimpse of the utter depravity of antediluvian humanity with the cannibalism scenes and King Tubal-Cain and his hordes trying to slaughter anything that still lives, so that's at least somewhat faithful to the biblical narrative.
Where it goes off the rails....let me count the ways.
1) Tubal-Cain getting onto the ark. Sorry, but that didn't happen. How do I know this? Because God Himself sealed the ark after all the animals and Noah's family had boarded it. I really don't think He would have allowed a homicidal maniac to get aboard as well when He had specifically promised to preserve Noah and his family. Moreover, once Tubal-Cain was aboard, why didn't he simply take out Noah and his family? Isn't that what he was trying to do before they embarked? Or at least murder all the women so that the extinction of humanity would be guaranteed. This was a cinematic case of the burro that starved to death between two bales of hay. The only purpose for Tubal-Cain's trespass is to turn Ham against his father Noah, but that seems to be pretty much already the case. It's a plot contrivance that Aronofsky and Handel chickened out on taking to its logical conclusion - and since they were already ripping apart the Genesis account, I don't know why they didn't fulfill this thread.
2) The "Watchers". This was obviously an homage to the Thor movies and Lord of the Rings. I suppose I wouldn't have minded them quite as much if they were just what they appeared to be - animate creatures made of stone. It would have been silly, but their purpose in the plot - protecting Noah and his family from Tubal-Cain's berserker hordes - wouldn't have completely crapped on the integrity of the biblical story.
But....no. They are specifically described as "fallen angels". Problem is, fallen angels are also known as "demons". There are two basic categories of demons: those that are free to roam the cosmos (for now), and those that are bound in the "Pit". The Bible doesn't say just exactly what or where the Pit is, but the demons imprisoned there are so virulently vicious and wicked that the LORD did not allow them run loose. And, if you go and actually read the Genesis flood account, and note the horrifically evil condition of antediluvian humanity, and then figure in that virulently vicious and wicked "fallen angels" were both encouraging and participating in it, you'd have to conclude that, how shall I say this, the "Watchers" were not Noah's friends.
Wearisomely, Aronofsky and Handel screw it all up - and blasphemously so, I might add.
In their re-telling, the Watchers aren't "fallen angels" at all; they're angels that compassionately came down from heaven to help the "seed of Adam" after God had cruelly and arbitrarily thrown them out of the Garden of Eden. For their insolence, God turns them into stone creatures and banishes them to Earth. After Noah's grandpa Methuselah somehow "helps" them one time, they become friends and allies of the human patriarchy. Except that they were already sympathetic to the human patriarchy, or they would never have defied God to come help it in the first place. <sigh>
3) By the way, it's hard not to notice that Aronofsky and Handel depict the LORD as a real bastard, isn't it? In their version He never once speaks to Noah or tells him why He's judging the planet or when the flood is coming or THAT a flood is coming aside from his "having a disturbing dream". Because naturally, whenever I have a disturbing dream about a global deluge, the first thing I do is make a mad dash for Home Depot. See the product placement opportunity on which A&H missed out?
Also, in this version the ark is evidently all Noah's idea, even though the Bible clearly states that God told him to build the ark, including the materials and exact specifications. And isn't it, um, "miraculous" that animals came streaming from around the entire world to get on the ark? It's like Noah didn't have to bother with that part of the operation because he was too busy with "his" ark. In reality, of course, Noah would, and did, have to retrieve a mating pair of every representative species - entailing a great deal of taxonomical knowledge that he either "just had," or God gave him. That would have taken a lot longer than eight years, or so it seems to me.
The worst part, though, is the depravity that Noah feels obligated to commit because he thinks it's "the Creator's" will. And it stems from yet another licentious departure from the Genesis account.
There we see that Shem, Ham, and Japheth are already married. In the A&H retelling, none of them are, and Noah decides that his sons need poontang, as though the thought never occurred to them. Only, astonishly enough, none of Tubal-Cain's women are good enough for his sons, so he gives up.
<facepalm>
Meanwhile, Ham - obviously the horniest of the three brothers - makes a mad dash out of the ark after it would have been sealed to "get hisself a woman". He doesn't find a woman, but he does find a "frightened young girl," creating pedophilia possibilities that A&H promptly squander by having the "frightened young girl" fall into an animal trap on her and Ham's return to the ark, followed by Noah forcing Ham to leave her behind as Tubal-Caine's hordes come to eat her like The Walking Dead.
What? Pedophilia isn't biblical? Do you know what Noah's real-life daughters-in-law did with him while he was in a drunken stupor after the flood? Oh, but wait, there was Ila, Noah's fictional adopted daughter, wasn't there? And she did get preggers, which means somebody - okay, Shem - helped themselves to her goodies, didn't they? So there was incest after all! Yay!
The plot purpose of this sequence is to turn Ham against Noah and convolutedly extricate that plot thread with Ila's pregnancy, from which Noah somehow draws the conclusion that if she has a boy, yay! Whereas if she has a girl, he must kill the child - his granddaughter - "because the Creator might want me to". What today we know as "post-birth abortion". Don't worry, A&H chickened out on that one, too.
The plot purpose of that, in turn, was to set up a steel cage death match between Noah and Tubal-Cain - which I guess means that there was a little Gladiator in this flick after all - which, of course, Noah wins, with the help of
The finger-flicking cherry atop the disinformation sundae was the epilog, where Ila confronts Noah over why he didn't off his granddaughters in light of God giving him the choice of whether or not humanity survived - which He didn't, by the way, and certainly not in this movie, since God never appears so much as once. Noah's reply? When he saw his granddaughters, he realized that he loved them (not-so-subtle abortion propaganda) and that they represented the goodness of mankind. Despite the fact that God explicitly wiped out mankind aside from Noah and his family because there was not a single other human being on the planet who was not irredeemably not good.
Here's a suggestion, folks: for about the same price as a theater ticket, buy yourself a Bible if you don't already have one, and read the true account of the Flood in Genesis. And then the rest of the Bible as well. Repeatedly. And save your movie money for Captain America: The Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past. At least those flicks really are fantasies.
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