Noah (Page 1 of 3)

That analogy by Trey:

"this movie is Lord of the Rings if you are telling it from Sauron's point of view"

Amazing!

I'm having issues getting the Noah podcast to show up in the itunes feed.  I unsubscribed to the podcast and re-subscribed but that didn't do anything.  Then I deleted the podcast and when I went to subscribe again, not only do none of the episodes show up, but the artwork is missing.  What the hell!

When I went to the iTunes store to get it, it showed up on my iPad as its own feed (as opposed to the one I'm subscribed to). Something is mislabeled somewhere.

Fixed, for the not-showing-up-in-iTunes people.

Edit: If it's any consolation, Teague, I still like you

Last edited by fireproof78 (2014-08-21 19:02:12)

Thanks Holden!

Noah was fucking awesome. That is all.....

This is visionary directing. Holy shit. The first act is amazing, the creation montage sublime, the imagery throughout stupendous. The stars, the stars!!!

An incredible achievement.

Totally undermined by the movie’s obvious admission of God’s existence and/or God’s inability/unwillingness to communicate. It all went south to me when the birds came flying. What a disaster. Aronofsky’s thing seems to be environmentalism, but his whole message is cluttered up by God’s B-plot.

So, what is this movie trying to say?

It seems to be saying that Noah is God’s chosen one and that we are to sympathise with Noah’s, and thereby God’s, cause. But how can we sympathise with that cause when God is either so thoroughly stupid, or such a jerk, as to not clearly explain his plan to Noah?

It’s not a cautionary tale for what can happen when wrongly interpreting an order because the order is so obviously obscure to everybody watching that it should be unreasonable to everybody to expect anyone to perfectly understand it.

It’s not a cautionary tale for what can happen through bad leadership, cause the movie seems to want us rooting for God through Hermione’s speech at the end.

It does not want us to think God does not exist in the movie’s universe, because it is obvious that he does.

It does not want us to think God is a jerk and that we should hate him, cause again see Hermione’s speech.

So the conclusion is that God exists and is stupid, but that we should love him anyway? What kind of message is that?

Or maybe we are supposed to think Hermione, and possibly Noah and everybody else, but God, is stupid? Noah seems to be quite smart, so that really falls apart. And, how are we as the audience supposed to relate to idiots, and in fact relate to being framed as idiots? Again, what kind of message is that? Ok, framing the audience as idiots can of course be a device, but I really don’t think the movie is trying to go there, I feel the tone and epilogue suggests otherwise.

Or maybe we are to believe that God, while mighty, is not almighty, and needs a little bit of help. But nothing in the movie remotely corroborates this other than possibly the wanting storytelling, and that would be a seriously daft idea.

Or is the point to say that this story is a stupid story? The tone of the movie certainly does not suggest that. Quite the opposite, it seems to want us to take it very seriously.

It may play as Sauron’s end of the tale, but in no way do I believe that was Aronofsky’s point. If it was he has totally failed in conveying that. Nothing in the movie remotely suggests this and it should be obvious that most people would not read it as that, and as he seems very eager to get a message across and being widely regarded as a rather blunt storyteller, I can’t believe it.

I feel he should have changed it a little bit more, like removing the obvious existence of God, or having God speak directly to Noah, and have Noah knowingly and clearly defy God’s word. I feel that would have made the movie way more interesting, as it stands now I feel the whole point of the movie is moot, or rather, that it is pointless.

I didn’t know anything about the movie before I saw it, only that it was based on the Noah story, and more importantly, the stone giants, so that wasn’t a surprise to me, though it would have been a welcome one, I love the giants. I wonder if that surprise change makes a big or small difference in how one feels about the movie.

Overall, in the end I lean towards Teague’s sentiment I guess (or do I?), though the stars in the daytime sky are awesome.

So to me a failure, a spectacularly beautiful and visionary failure, but ultimately a failure.

Infuriating, it’s so incredibly brilliant! So close.

But maybe I’m missing something, that is quite possible, I get easily confused.

Hehe, well, more precisely, had it followed the book on that note at least it wouldn’t have failed in that way.

I love Nowflake too!

No, it's a Babylonian story that the Hebrews ripped off while they were in exile in the 6th century BC.

The Babylonian account, recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates to at least another 1000 years BEFORE the Jewish version. It's got all the same ingredients. The Babylonians, in turn, probably developed the story from actual flooding in southern Iraq (Sumerian flood plain and birth of the first city states and origin of writing) where the Tigris and Euphrates converge.

Just this year, a new book came out by an Assyriologist from the British Museum, where several ancient cuneiform tablets are housed, recounting this earlier Flood myth...

Well, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks and so on, because that's what I liked most about the movie - the ambiguity of it.

The usual Bible movie premise is "We already agree that whatever God wants is good so here's a story about somebody who did what God wanted and lived happily ever after."   That's why Bible movies are especially tedious - talk about no stakes! 

But if a group of real humans - rather than fairy tale archetypes - actually lived through the events in most Bible stories, some of those real humans would surely say "Seriously, are we sure this is right?"  Noah is about humans trying to interpret the will of a god who clearly exists, but doesn't give much info about what He's up to.

So, me - I didn't think the movie needed to make it clear to us what God "wanted" - any more than God needed to make that clear to Noah.