Noah Movie: Top 5 Blogs Reviewing Darren Aronofsky's Film
What now seems like it was just a trickle of opinion leading into the opening of the Noah movie over the weekend became a flood of viewpoints from all over the websphere on Monday, including blog posts that dissected every nuance of the Darren Aronofsky film.
Brian Godawa, Hollywood screenwriter and author of the biblical fantasy Noah Primeval, said after he wrote a pre-review of the movie based on an early script nearly a couple years ago, that he "became Satan for Paramount and its elitist director of dark unsympathetic sick and twisted heroes, Darren Aronofsky."
His review of the actual movie came after seeing it with the general public this past weekend.
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"I finally saw the movie," Godawa writes. "And now I know why Paramount and its hired Christian marketers would not let me into an early screening to correct my analysis of the early script of Noah.
"Because I was right.
"Not only that, but the differences between the script and the final movie are so negligible that I won't have to change a single word of my critique. Just go back and read that and you'll get the sick twisted agenda that seeps through every frame of this movie.
"Wait. I take it back. It's actually worse than the script."
Godawa was not alone in panning the movie. Below are five blogs (including two somewhat favorable) that take a look at the movie in depth, together giving a good sampling of the spectrum of opinion that was not hard to find on Monday.
1. The Noah Movie: Deconstructing Noah's Arc; Godawful Storytelling by Brian Godawa
"Aronofsky has hijacked the Biblical narrative and subverted it to preach his secular humanistic atheist enviro-worship. He said himself that the story is just a myth that he turned into a prop for environmentalism. But its not even good preaching. He's a cheesy atheist preacher."
2. I'm a Christian and I Think 'Noah' Deserves a Four Star Review by Matt Walsh
"Christian apologists for this movie have claimed that the Rock Monsters are, in fact, 'Biblical' because Genesis does make vague mention of 'giants.' That's like turning Jesus into an Olympic figure skater and calling it 'theologically accurate' because the New Testament says he walked on water."
3. Where the Stars Are Strange: A Review of Noah by Kevin McLenithan
"Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel do not invent the darkness but merely accentuate it; viewers would do well to remember that the book of Genesis depicts rapes, murders, and betrayals right alongside its descriptions of divine providence and human faith. This accentuated darkness has a purpose, too. Thanks to Aronofsky's staging, the central dramatic tension between mercy and divine justice is not a conflict between two abstract concepts. Rather, it becomes a matter of literal life and death."
4. Sympathy for the Devil by Brian Mattson
"The world of Aronofsky's Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe of 'higher' and 'lower.' The 'spiritual' is good, and way, way, way 'up there' where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the 'material' is bad, and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. This is not only true of the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but of fallen angels, who are explicitly depicted as being spirits trapped inside a material 'body' of cooled molten lava. Admittedly, they make pretty nifty movie characters, but they're also notorious in Gnostic speculation."
5. Bashers of the Noah Film Should Re-Read Their Bibles by James T. Tabor
"None of these Christian critics explain why this ancient story, written by Jews, and part of the Hebrew Bible, should fall under Christian purview or guardianship in terms of its interpretation. But that aside, these two Jewish guys, Aronofsky and his former Harvard roommate and writing partner, Ari Handel, in aiming for what they call the 'least biblical' of Bible themed films, have ended up in my view producing a film that profoundly reflects biblical themes that have been lost in most common readings of the Noah story in Genesis 6-9."
