It is one thing to take poetic license with stories from the Bible but it is another thing to turn the story into a joke and mock God.
Eric Erikson of Redstate has the best review of the movie I’ve read. He says it is one of funniest movies he’s seen and Darren Aronofsky deserves a great deal of praise for turning a serious subject into a non-stop laugh fest of techno-electro music, orchestral scores, blasting special effects, and even rock monsters.
It was a pretty awesome sci-fi spectacle complete with Ent like rock monsters, a super powered Methuselah, glow in the dark space aliens Adam and Eve, and Hermione Granger. “God” is never mentioned. He is referred to throughout as the “Creator”. I get that a director has to fill a two hour movie based off of a couple of chapters in the Bible, but holy cow!
If the producers had framed this movie as a “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” allegory, that’d be one thing. But to say it is faithful to the Book of Genesis is just pandering with a lie on the end. We might should consider burning at the stake any Christian leader who endorses this move. You can read the review at this link.
Aronofsky, on the other hand, says every part of the story fits the biblical narrative and illustrates tension between wickedness and forgiveness. “We were trying to dramatize the decision God must have made when he decided to destroy all of humanity. If you read the story of Noah, it’s very straightforward. The character of Noah just builds the ark and collects the animals. But the struggles, the effort of building an ark, of being responsible for all those animals, being responsible for your family, it’s not explored at all. So how exciting to actually say, “Oh wow, here’s this great story, how do we put human emotion into it?”
In the Biblical story of Noah God says that the ‘sons of God’ (fallen angels) took the daughters of flesh man to wife resulting in the birth of nephilim, or giants as used in the King James Version, the offspring of the fallen angels. And God saw the wickedness and that every intent or thought was evil so he decided to destroy man. Noah and his family were saved because their generation (lineage) had not been polluted. He told Noah (v.19) to take two of every living thing of all flesh and that included two of all human races that lived upon the earth along with the animals.
Now whether you take the story to be that God flooded the whole earth or only that area of the earth where Noah lived is of no consequences. Eve became the mother of all living in that through her womb (lineage) Christ would be born. The fallen angels and their god, Satan, made an attempt to destroy that lineage so that Christ could not be born.
There were no rock monsters, no magic snake skin, no Methuselah, no hallucinogenic tea, and no magic seeds. Noah was not a vegeterian and never attempted to murder his family.
Erickson is correct, if your minister encouraged you to attend this fairytale, its high time to find another church.
