Movie Commentary: Noah (Spoilers)

Of the many religiously-themed movies to come out so far this year, the most controversial one by far is Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, starring Russell Crowe in the titular role. It has been both highly praised and emphatically condemned by Christians,  both Catholic and non-Catholic alike. And of all opinions to not particularly matter, mine would certainly be foremost; but then what’s the point of having a blog, after all? That said, I’ll cut right to the chase: I pretty much loved Noah. I certainly do not love everything about it. It is not a perfect movie, and its theology is not perfect. But then again, when was the last time you saw a movie that met either criteria? I find many of the complaints leveled against the movie to be largely unfair; however, since these issues have already been addressed by minds infinitely more competent than my own, I would only like to draw attention to one of the many positive themes in the movie (For a detailed analysis of the complaints commonly made against the movie, I would direct people to Stephen Greydanus' excellent article on the subject at http://decentfilms.com/articles/noah-controversy .)

The concept of Original Sin is actually taken quite seriously in this movie. So much so that Noah, recognizing that sin is present within himself and each of the members of his family, concludes that they are no more worthy to survive the flood than is the rest of humanity. Therefore, Noah is convinced that it is God's will that he and is family die out without reproducing any further human beings. In other words, humanity is so corrupted that God, according to Noah, wants to revert back to the way things were in the Garden of Eden prior to the entrance of evil into the world, which is to say prior to man's existence.

Things however get complicated when Noah realizes that his son Shem's wife, thought to be barren, is in fact pregnant (in the movie Shem is the only son to have a wife, one of the few overt departures from the Biblical text but one I am inclined to forgive since it leads to interesting theological issues without doing any major injustice to its source). So convinced is Noah that all of humanity is too far gone that he believes that God wants him to kill the baby, in order to ensure that humanity does not continues to propagate. Now on the one hand, it is all too easy for us with our modern sensibilities to scoff at the idea that God would want Noah to kill his own grandchild; but on the other hand, Noah is earnestly seeking God's will so far as he understands it, and he understands that God is wiping out the rest of humanity because of it's sin. But again, if sin is also present in Noah and his family, it not at least possible that God wants them to ultimately die off as well? The situation also harkens back (well..."back" for us, for Noah it would be more like a foreshadowing) to God asking Abraham to sacrifice his own son.

What ends up happening (spoiler alert) is that Shem's wife gives birth to twins, and Noah is fully prepared to kill them both. When it comes to the crucial moment however, Noah, with knife raised in mid-air and everything, can't bring himself to do it. This leads to him sinking into a drunken depression because he is convinced that he has failed God. That is until his daughter-in-law (Emma Watson) sets him straight. She tells Noah that God placed the decision of humanity's fate in Noah's hands precisely because He knew that Noah would make the right choice. Noah decided, she goes on to say, that humanity was worth saving. "You chose mercy, you chose love." The movie ends with Noah repeating the words of the creation story, that man is made in God's image and that humanity must "be fruitful and multiply."

So here's the bottom line. For all it's accusations of being anti-human and radically environmentalist. the central drama of the movie is whether or not humanity is worth saving. And Noah decides that it is. In other words, love and mercy end up trumping strict, rigid justice -a sentiment that foreshadows humanity's ultimate salvation at the hands of Our Lord Jesus Christ, And like Our Lord, Noah decides that despite our sinfulness, humanity is worth saving.

Despite it's flaws, I found Noah to be both entertaining and theologically challenging.  In this day and age, a movie that uses a biblical story to demonstrate the relationship between the reality of sin and the love and mercy of God deserves to be taken seriously.

Pax Vobiscum