Noah...Whoa

I went to see the movie. I have two points of view that are conflicting with each other. First things first, I have no problem with telling God's story via the cinema. If anything it might help get the Word out there. So my two POVs happen to be 1. Girl who just likes a good story [henceforth referred to as G1] and 2. Girl who can't stand deviations from the book (in this case, the Bible, the history) [henceforth referred to as G2].

G1:
The cinematography was good. The actors were incredible. There was conflict and resolution, classic good versus evil, and some routing for the underdog. They took a step back from God's hand in things. Any message sent from above was cryptic at best, left to be deciphered by man. This, as I'm sure can be guessed, leads to many problems throughout the movie. Noah's internal struggle of deciding whether or not there should be humans in the new world was very potent. As the viewer, you feel for both sides of his argument. The was a use of angels to speed the plot along. They also gave us a definite evil in Cain's descendants. Desire to live vs. believing God wanted didn't want man to destroy his world again. Personally I can think of many other ways that God can blight a single species, but whatever. The struggle was real.

G2:
 Accuracy wasn't there. If you go into this movie expecting an accurate depiction of the Noah builds an ark that we all know and love from our Bibles, well... No. It doesn't happen. Lamech gets killed in the beginning while Noah is just a boy. Check your Bibles people. Lamech lives to see all of his grandchildren born. Noah doesn't even have kids until after he's been on the planet for five, count 'em, 5 centuries. Just when you think this thing is going to catch up with it's serious lapse in accuracy, it surprises you and doesn't. I thought he would finally age when they needed to grow a forest strong enough to build an ark. Then God shows up and gives him a forest in ten years. One of three time lapse allowed in the whole movie. Even they couldn't ignore that childhood takes some time to pass. I don't really want to go into a diatribe over who made it onto the boat. I fear this entry will never end if I do. I will allow myself to pose this question. An ark big enough and sturdy enough to hold eight people and two of EVERY kind of animal has walls thin enough for a man to peck his way through them in a matter of minutes? Umm. Shh. Don't. I don't think so.

So recap:
G1: It was magical and whimsical.
G2: There was more wizardry than God's miracles.

G1: Eight people made it to the new world. That's accurate.
G2: Umm, Ham and Japheth had wives before the rain started. This movies way of them getting wives muddles the ancestry considerably.

G1: Noah struggles to understand the message God send. In the end he makes the correct decisions.
G2: In this time where God's Spirit was chilling out on Earth with us, He wasn't big on ambiguous messages. He tended to just flat out tell you what He wanted. None of this up-to-your-interpretation crap.

G1: Simple Cain created an evil act so his descendants lived in sin as well.
G2: Everyone save Noah lived in sin. Maybe even Noah, he just happened to find favor in God's eyes. Seth's lineage was not just Noah. Plenty of other people came from Seth who also died in the flood.

G1: The world was destroyed and created again.
G2: The world was destroyed and even though it didn't take a century to build the ark, there were times where you felt the movie couldn't end fast enough.



Frustration aside, I did appreciate the raw emotion put into these roles. Noah was an intensely complicated man who had the fate of mankind in his hands. He had to sentence them to death and that decision took it's toll. As a person familiar with and looking for the Bible story in cinematic form I had difficulty sitting through the movie. I later decided after discussion with a friend that if it at least provoked the exploration of the written Word or started a conversation than it has done something for Christianity.