A positive Christian review of Noah
By Ian Huyett
I should probably start by warning you that I would make a terrible career film critic. My reasoning is simple: I actually like movies. If you share the jaded and esoteric preferences of contemporary movie reviewers, then, you might want to take my assessment with a grain of salt.
That said, my analysis is this: I thought Noah was good. I’m not sure precisely how good yet, but certainly good enough to justify the IMAX ticket I purchased, and maybe even good enough to warrant a second viewing. There was also nothing in it that I think conservative Christians should find outrageous.
In the words of positive reviewer Matthew Jacobs, “Everything you’ve read in the Bible is there. It just fills in the holes with fantasy.” Except for a short prologue, Noah spans Genesis chapters 6 through 9, which I just reread in a few minutes. If it’s unacceptable to embellish a story of this length, then it must be unacceptable to make that story into a two-hour film. If this is the case, then we should be objecting not just to Darren Aronofsky’s writing, but to his making the story into a movie at all.
Perhaps the best way to offer a positive Christian take on this film is by responding to some of the many negative reviews that Christians have given it. Notably, liberty-minded Christian writer Matt Walsh gave the movie a scathing review. I have the utmost respect for Walsh, so I waited to read his review until after I saw Noah, lest he poison me against the film. Reading it now, I think Walsh was, uncharacteristically, less than fair.
For instance, Walsh notes that at one point, the Bad Guy’s monologue “consists entirely of simply and accurately quoting Scripture (this is how you identify the bad guy in a Hollywood movie).” Yet Scripture depicts Satan himself as quoting Scripture accurately.
I’m pleased to see that, towards the end of his review, Walsh expresses an opinion of movie critics similar to my own. The critics loved Noah, he says, “because they’re a herd of politically correct cattle and this is a movie that they’re ‘supposed’ to like. It’s made by an ‘important’ director. It’s ‘controversial.’ It’s upsetting a bunch of Tea Party types.” I empathize with Walsh here, but think that his contempt for the cultural elite, though itself a good thing, may have led to an undue bias against this film.
The protagonists of Noah are those characters who are loyal to the Creator – and who seek and find forgiveness for their sins. Conversely, the antagonist of the film is vocally hostile to the Creator, defies the Creator by crowning himself king, and extolls the infinite potential of man. Relative to the usual work of the liberal intelligentsia, all of this was a step in the right direction.
Noah is a lot like the horror film Paranormal Activity. People thought that Paranormal Activity was going to be terrifying, and so they were terrified by it. In reality, it was boring. Likewise, many Christian critics thought they were going to be offended by Noah, and so they were. In reality, it was fairly entertaining.
I have significantly less respect for Ken Ham than for Walsh, so I didn’t wait to read Ham’s review. Ham complains about what he sees as the misanthropic character of the film. Walsh, too, seems to take issue with the movie’s general violence and darkness. Yet the story of Genesis 6-9 is misanthropic. Ephesians 2:3, which warns us that all men are “by nature children of wrath,” is misanthropic. Confronting the grave and monumental reality of human sin isn’t anti-Christian – it is real. It is only by acknowledging our nature that we can hope to transcend it. Noah attempts to do so.
There are similar themes in some of Aronofsky’s other work. To be sure, I disliked the bizarre and incoherent ‘Black Swan,’ and of course would have preferred a Noah from a skilled Christian director – or at least a non-atheist one. But, for an atheist making a film out of a Bible story, I think Aronofsky did about as good a job as was possible.
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