Sorry about the late reply, I’m on a tight schedule this week and my brain is fried.
Dorkman wrote:
I still don't see how you're getting "pro-God" out of it. It treats God as a given, sure -- the same way GHOSTBUSTERS treats ghosts as a given. I don't think of GHOSTBUSTERS as pro-ghost nor is NOAH pro-God. As Doc said, the big climax of the film is NOAH deciding he doesn't care what God wants, humanity is worth preserving. It's probably one of the most pro-human films I've seen in years.
I read Watson’s speech at the end as the director speaking through her character. It’s classic cinematic language, this is how the theme or the moral of a piece so often is conveyed. Though Aronofsky may not have intended to use Watson as a mouthpiece, movie language makes it appear so. That this was God's will all the time is heavily implied not only by Watson, but also by the fact that there are no repercussions to his choice, they find land and live on. It has a happy ending and a rainbow.
I don’t think Aronofsky ever intended it to be expressly pro-God, but reading the movie by itself it is. And I’m not sure it’s really anymore pro-human than most stories, all humans in this movie, except a few, die. It's pro-human only if humans decides to do what God secretly wants them to do. It’s actually aggressively anti any human not sharing Aronofsky’s specific philosophy, and a scathing criticism of most of humanity in general. But it has hopefulness, it’s a plea for rehabilitation, which I honestly at times found quite effective, though a bit blunt, but that may well be necessary.
Dorkman wrote:
EDIT: And yeah, it's pretty clear in the Torah that God isn't all-powerful or transcendently wise at all. He's capricious and jealous, prone to genocidal mood swings and fucking up in assorted ways he regrets later. With very little effort you can read the stories as a comedy of errors about an incompetent creator who keeps making things exponentially worse as he tries to fix a previous mistake, like some cosmic Mr. Bean. Some of it can be attributed to the Hebrew religion originally being polytheistic and all the gods being collapsed into one -- but not all of it can. The idea of his omnipotence is clearly "my god is better than your god" propaganda.
Haha, that’s so, well, jewish, i love it!
Trey wrote:
I'm not sure the movie ever defines what God wanted - if indeed he "wanted" any particular outcome. If Noah had killed infants and ended the human race, the God of this movie might have said "huh, interesting" and then started over the next day with sentient crocodiles. He's God, after all - he can do/undo anything if he chooses to.
Maybe it's all an experiment without a "right" or "wrong" outcome. Noah has his take on what it all meant, his wife has another, God doesn't say either way. In the end, He lets the human race continue - that's the only thing the movie says for sure.
Which, again, is what was so interesting and refreshing to me about this movie, as compared to the standard Hollywood Bible flick.
Noah is the agent of God in this movie. It is Noah we follow throughout, and he is portrayed as able, smart, caring, concerned about nature, so basically your all-round good guy. After all, he saves all the animals. He builds the ark, which seems to be the thing God wanted as all the animals flock to it when it's done. And the bad guys are portrayed as not men of God and very bad. In the climax we are to root for Noah because he makes the humane choice of sparing the children. Then Watson speaks to Noah about God, and as I said above, I read Watson’s speech at the end as implying that this was what God wanted and that it is good, and then a rainbow! It is heavily implied throughout both what God wanted and that it, in the end, was a good thing.
There is nothing in the movie implying this is some interesting experiment by God, I think that is reading into the movie, not out of it. That would have been interesting and subversive, but I don’t think this movie is subversive in any other way than that it deviates from the story in its form.
Trey wrote:
The closest analog I can think of is - believe me or not - the Schwarzenegger Conan movie, and the climactic scene where Conan "prays" to Crom by saying "Yo, I'ma do this thing now. I think it's what I should do. It'd be nice if you helped me, and if you don't then the hell with you." And then Crom sorta does help maybe a little, or maybe he doesn't actually - the movie never says for sure. I see the movie of Noah doing pretty much the same thing, and I dig it.
I believe it, I think this is in line with the mentions of the Jewish god previous. Though, I don’t think of Crom in any way as I think of God. I think of him more like a greek god than the god of all. And, Crom’s place in cultural awareness and importance is infinitely tiny compared to God’s. As I’ve said above, I think it unreasonable and a miscalculation expecting people to read the movie with disregard to the common cultural awareness of both the ark story and God himself. So I think this is reading into the movie rather than what Aronofsky has you read out of it.
Marty J wrote:
I would highly recommend this
That’s a cool little resource to know about, tucks it away for a rainy day 
I kind of think this discussion speaks to the movie’s failure. Everybody’s talking about God, the ark story, history and religion, no one is talking about the movie’s environmentalist theme.
On another note: The movie was commercially successful, and it was bound to, how could it not be? A lot of christians will see it by default, a lot of cinephiles will see it because Aronofsky is tackling a Bible story, a lot of people in general will see it because it is the ark story and because Russell Crowe stars in the movie. Controversy only makes this more the case. Was this ever a risky movie really? A conventional Bible movie would be the risky thing.
The Low Frequenter
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