Doctor Submarine wrote:
See, I find this version way less interesting. Uncertainty is what makes the movie so compelling, but not the binary uncertainty that you're suggesting. Noah keeps trying to figure out exactly WHY God wants what He wants, when the whole point was for Noah to come to a conclusion about humanity for himself.
Boiling it down to "Is God real or is Noah crazy?" just isn't as dramatic as what we got. And your last sentence just isn't correct, because the whole climax hinges on Noah NOT listening to God.
Noah doesn’t know what God meant because God never told him, so he cannot NOT listen to what he’s never been told. Noah doubts himself, an unnecessary doubt as long as God exists. Without God it would have been interesting and relatable. In the end he came to a conclusion and listened to himself, but that choice is made moot by the director virtually telling us through Watson’s character that this was God’s point, or if you will, plan, all the time. After all Noah was chosen by God to build the ark and start anew. I imagine God knew what he was doing as it is unreasonable to expect anyone to read this God as anyone else than the God we are told is almighty and all-knowing. So, in the end, no real stakes.
Noah had it right, then unneccessarily has it wrong, to again have it right, but unneccessarily thinking he is wrong, then we are unneccessarily told he was right. It’s farcical and not fulfilling. The God character has no function, it only confuses. The movie would hold the same message without God, only we would have to infer it, which would be way more fulfilling. And it would be way more interesting because we would be left with an ambiguous ending, in fact, ambiguity all the way through, not like it is now, boiled down as you put it, and clear cut.
The story in the Bible is clear, in fact down to the cubit, and not confusing. Aronofsky manufactures forced drama to justify a movie and unnecessary clouds the story, only to end up in the same place not even making commentary through the change of the character.
The only thing ambiguous in the narrative of the movie is whether Noah figures out what God wants or not, because God won’t tell him. Personally I couldn’t care less about what God wants if he can’t be arsed to just say it, let alone the purported benign nature of an unseen sadist. I don’t think Aronofsky does either, I think he only cares about the environmentalist issue, so that feels to me like something went wrong in the writing.
But, as I said, I’m easily confused. I may have missed something, but this just didn’t feel right or genuine to me.
Invid wrote:
Not every atheist seeks to turn religious fables into anti-god sermons. He just treated it as he would a film about greek mythology, where the gods are real and everyone knows it.
And surprisingly changed God from how he was portrayed in the actual story, and made a pro-god sermon of it. At least it’s unorthodox.
Also, there is a huge difference between the gods in greek mythology and God, those are not comparable, the ramifications are entirely different. The greek gods are not almighty and all-knowing and perfect, they are just for all intents and purposes very powerful creatures, but expressly fallible and worthy of a tale.
The God character is why Bible stories as narrative are boring, auto deus ex machina. They work as fable and parable, not as narrative stories.
I realise I seem over zealous about this, but I’m a bit obsessive in general and I like discussion.
Most things would be improved by Bill Cosby.
Last edited by Snowflake (2014-08-27 19:28:06)
The Low Frequenter