Sunday, March 30, 2014

NOAH (the movie) would be better titled AH NO!

(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