(Spoiler alert!) The Noah movie does have a couple redeeming qualities
like the awesome special effects and the creation montage, though that part was
too short. Going in, I expected a purely fictional story and so I won’t touch
on any inaccuracies here. BUT … even if you think you’d like a movie where
Water World meets Transformers you may still be disappointed. The Noah
character is bent on seeing that the entire world is destroyed (because it is
his calling from above) and this includes his own family. At the end he
suddenly has a change of heart; however, this change of character comes out of nowhere
with little to no motivation.
Tubal Cain, the evil king who sneaks aboard the ark, points
out that Noah has become a servant to the animals when in fact man was created
to have dominion over the animals. His observation is dead-on and the writers
would have done good to listen to their own character – that something was
amiss.
Fallen angels who have become rock people rise up from the
earth to help Noah build the ark and fend off the deluge of people who attack
it when rain comes. This was plainly bizarre and the one and only rock person
we interact with in the movie had a developed history but no personality.
The emotional scenes in the film failed miserably and this
may have been because the only character we could even begin to remotely
identify with was Ham. Those that protect the ark are all killed and they die
and go to heaven. This could have been a profound emotional scene except for
the fact that we never got any screen time to bond with any of them beforehand
and – they were rock people.
Every story about Noah ends with a rainbow and the pulsating
circular light was different; however, it became redundant after the third time
they showed it. As an effect, it really wasn’t much better than the
disappointing burning bush in The Ten Commandments.
Overall, I left not only disappointment but also with a
feeling of disturbance. I can’t put my finger on what is troubling me so much
about this movie – I think maybe it is the fact that they spent $150-million
dollars and could have made a master piece but instead gave us indigestion.
David Speight – Author of Atlantis: Fall of the Gods and
Atlantis: Rise of the Nile
