Noah

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Noah

Go on Tony, chuck a SPOILER notice up and tell us some of the most ludicrous bits.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Noah

or just tell us, because we're not going to watch it without enough booze or drugs to see us through to the end

[Tony C]

Noah

Right; SPOILER ALERT (not that you deserve one if you are even remotely thinking about going to see this);

It's a film even more ludicrously put together than the bible itself (that should probably have been the film's strap line, actually).

Anyway it seems that when he was a teen young Noah was told by his old fella that...well I'm not really sure but these blokes who inhabited the earth killed his dad because.. well it's not made clear but it turns out that these big transformers made out of rock called The Watchers scour the earth because it seems the director is 're-imagining' the bible, as it seems he thinks there is not enough fiction in it already. Oh, and Cain - remember, him and Abel? - stows away aboard the ark and remains untroubled there for a full nine months and then tries to murder Noah who feels he has to murder his grandchildren as soon ad they are born because God says so. All of which shows Aronofsky's imagination is completely out of control.

What you can be sure of is that this is an incomprehensible mess; I've eaten bowls of spaghetti with greater structure than this film. It's neither a biblical epic nor a fantasy adventure. Just a big, expensive shambles. Completely uninteresting, flat and totally without credibility. Avoid it like a plague of locusts or something.

[evilC]

Noah

Wow! That sounds so mad it's actually made me more likely to watch it! (...When it crops up on terrestrial television one Saturday at midnight and I'm tipsy enough to try it.)

[alyxandr]

Noah

On the subject of good & evil brothers, are Tony 'n' Evil C related at all?

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Noah

We're all sons of Japheth (or someone) from no more than 5,000 years ago according to the book this film is based on.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Noah

hold on, noah's dad, dies shortly before the flood, when he's er, 777 years old, and Noah is his mid..... 590's. this movie is clearly unrealistic and nonsensical.

[dalliance]

Noah

I'd never want to see this nonsense myself but one positive thing that came out of it was an article that actually explained the story of Noah as the Bible tells it. I only knew the sketchiest details and in reality it's way more bats hit mental than anyone could imagine. Here's some detail:

For many hundreds of years, rabbis have been discussing their interpretations of the most minute clues in the text. Most of all they love to elaborate on what is not there, and, like all humans, try to make sense of contradictions, implausibility, reticence, and to uncover and make meaningful, as if it were Twitter, more puns than you can shake an olive branch at. The bellowing and infighting on paper that had been going on since the Hebrews returned from their exile in Babylon, was collected and edited in the early Middle Ages into various books of midrash: interjections, extrapolations, interpretation, each devoted to the books of the Bible.

And it continues today, the discourse and the amiable discord, by turns legalistic, linguistic, poetic, artistic, metaphysical, practical, transcendental, earthy, comedic. If it worries you, get to the bottom of it. For example, what about the fish? Didn't God say he was going to destroy all life on Earth, animal and human? So what about the fish? How is a flood going to harm them? There's a midrash for that. The deluge was hot rain, so the fish cooked. Ta-da!

Then again, and of course, there's another midrash: no, the fish didn't die, because God said, if you don't mind reading properly, he would destroy all he had created "from the face of the Earth". The fish, in the sea, were exempt. No mention of amphibians, one of those nasty ambiguities that Leviticus hates so much, both one thing and another (which makes any combination in a single thing unclean: clothes made of two kinds of fabric, animals that breed with other species), but the amphibians would surely have decided to take the watery route to survival.

There are so many absences in the story of the Flood. The greatest of them is Noah himself. From the moment God speaks to him until he leaves the ark and steps on to dry land, he never says a word. Most importantly, he does not reply when God tells him that he is going to destroy all living creatures except Noah and his family. Noah expresses no shock or horror at the idea of the mass destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants. Nor does he plead with God to think again, to give human and animal kind another chance. Even Abraham, that apparently super-obedient servant of God, who seems not to demur when commanded to kill his own son, even he stands up to God at the prospect of the destruction of Sodom. "That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked … and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham, so painfully obedient, dares to confront God and teach him a lesson in equity and justice.

Noah says not a word. He receives his orders to build the ark and sets about it. He is a man, it seems from his silence, from the Bible's silence, without concern for others, lacking empathy, or even curiosity as to why exactly he alone has been saved to remake the world and become the second Adam. All we are told is that God regrets having made men, that they were constantly evil, and "Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord … Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God".

Noah is apathetic, lacks vivacity, yet God, in choosing him, shows an irrationality we have seen before in Genesis (favouring Abel's offering over Cain's and setting up the first motive for murder, for example). Perhaps, at best, he is chosen for his blankness, for being all potential.

Noah, they say, planted the seeds of the cedar trees he needed to make the ark and waited 120 years for them to grow. Why? So that men would have a chance to ask him what he was doing. This is a poor recuperation of his character. Why not just warn them? The answer to that presumably is the brand new midrash of Noah-the-movie: Ray Winstone would only come and shout at him that he was talking rubbish, then set his hoard of CGI'd supporters against him. As I said, midrash goes on.The joys of the black holes of biblical storytelling also go on.

God tells Noah that men and women are to go in separately, and the male and female animals are also to be segregated. Sex is out. There will be none of that sort of thing until the ark floats back down to earth. It's quite sensible under the circumstances. There's Noah and his wife, his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, with their wives, all together for a year on a yacht filled to over-capacity with animals on one floor, the humans on another and dung on the ground floor. It needs self-control to cope with such living accommodation, without adding sex into the mix, let alone whatever offspring would have resulted. Though the overpowering stink surely would have reduced carnal impulses. It seems from the rabbis that what had been annoying God in the first place was the outlandish sexual goings-on. Not just men with women and those combinations, but humans with animals and animals with animals of different species.

In any case, Noah, at least, wouldn't have had time for sex. It turns out, inside a void in the narrative, that he didn't get a wink of sleep, from the moment he boarded the ark to the moment he left it. An entire year without sleep, because it was his job to feed the animals. He had to learn their schedules and preferences. Some ate by day, some by night. And they all had to be kept alive and contented. At last we begin to watch Noah learn how to know and care for others.

One of the things the Christian evangelicals complained about in Aronofsky's film was a scene in which Noah gets drunk. Which is odd, because he may not have been an eco-warrior hero in the biblical story, but he certainly did get drunk. In fact, he planted the world's first vineyard, and then took a fancy to its produce. "And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent."

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Noah

Applause. I'm uncovered within my tent reading it.

[Tony C]

Noah

I fear that the descriptions of this film as "batshit mental" and the like, whilst patently true, might actually tempt people to see it on the premise that it's wildly engaging, or perhaps one of those "so bad it's good" experiences.

It's really not; it's extremely poorly paced, completely lacking in tension. It's actually a very boring film.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Noah

The bit about him being uncovered in his tent is apparently really really important, for reasons I can't fully grasp. His son either sees his tackle, or rapes him or castrates him depending on your viewpoint and is cursed, and his winds up justifying genocide or something

The Old Testament is completely insane, and generally pretty horrifying, and that stuff about Midrash is very interesting. They seem to be mostly about trying to bridge the gap between the foundation myths and and folk tales of a particularly violent and murderous desert tribe, and their sophisticated descendants who were living in Babylonian splendour.

There was a lot of hard work put into explaining one particular bible verse where god meets Moses in a pub and is going to kill him until Moses' wife grabs a knife and hacks off her son's foreskin. Apparently that was considered a bit off even 3000 years ago.

Mind you the New Testament isn't much better and the popular portrayal of Jesus as a hippy does gloss over his message that you should love one another (because god is coming very very soon and he is going to fuck up your shit)

[alyxandr]

Noah

dalliance wrote: For example, what about the fish? Didn't God say he was going to destroy all life on Earth, animal and human? So what about the fish? How is a flood going to harm them? There's a midrash for that. The deluge was hot rain, so the fish cooked. Ta-da!

Close enough.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Noah

The thing is that there is substantial tree ring evidence for a thirty odd year period of rain that flooded large areas starting in 2354 Bc. In Ireland the trees from this period show evidence of being submerged for a long time. But this is linked with cometary activity, not god. Another one of these events happened around 536 ad, and precipitated the rise of the dark ages and the rise of Christianity in ireland

[Toro Toro]

Noah

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote: But this is linked with cometary activity, not god.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure you've quite grasped this whole "religion" thing.

[Toro Toro]

Noah

That's an absolutely cracking post, dalliance.

Toraic scholarship always fascinates me. Dennett has a thng about "chmess"; Chmess is a game just like chess, "except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one." And Toraic scholarship seems, in figurative terms, to go into insanely arcane detail about the precise hypothetical workings and tactical structure of chmess, even though all participants in the discussion are fully accepting that nobody may ever have actually played a game of it.

Dennett cites "Hebb's dictum" in this regard; "if something isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well."

But the whole existence of midrash has always seemed to me a glorious "fuck you" to that joyless, cheerless, stifling yoke around the neck of human ingenuity and endeavour.

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Noah

I watched it because Russel Crowe is in it. I wasn't even half way through before I was bored to death. And the rest was even worse. It might very well be Crowe's Waterworld, or whichever film sent Kevin Costner on that steep downhill out of Hollywoods main VIP lounge.

[Tony C]

Noah

"Crowe's Waterworld"....not bad, PPV.

[dalliance]

Noah

Do people not watch films despite Russell Crowe being in them?

[Borracho]

Noah

Crowe is such a cock that I actively avoid his movies. I think the last thing I watched with him in it was The Insider.

He paid a visit to Ireland recently and, depressingly, was fawned over from beginning to end.