NOAH, Prophet With a Buzz Cut!!

To Be Referenced Later

Haven't seen the new Russell Crowe cinematic event called NOAH?  Spoiler coming.  We saw it when we were in South Carolina, and I've been thinking about writing about it ever since.   My problem has been how to explain the way the film affected me.

It didn't offend me.  Not in any way.  I had read that the film would take liberties with the story as told in Genesis.  It was to be a movie not a sermon, and Genesis 6-8, from which the story comes, is short and sparse of detail.  Certainly, NOAH's producers had to be creative and make some stuff up to craft a 2 hour film.    For example, I had seen the trailers featuring the doomed hordes swooping down on the Ark. The swooping down isn't in the Bible.  It seemed very logical that swooping down like that could have occurred, though, and that the gathering of the hordes and the defending of the Ark would be cinematically exciting.  Ergo, the filmmakers added them.

The arrival of the CG birds and snakes and elephants and all was fabulous, and the idea of using a sort of magic incense to put all the animals into hibernation for the length of the Ark voyage was clever, too. (Remember, it wasn't for just 40 days.  It took another 150 for the land to dry up for habitation.)   This hibernation answered 2 questions that always bothered me:  1. Where did they store all the food, so animal wouldn't eat animal?  and 2.  What did they do with all the poop?  One hundred and ninety days of food and poop would be a challenge on any ship!  Just check with the Carnival Cruise Line.

Because I had read Genesis 6-8 before seeing the film, I was surprised by the fact that in the movie none of Noah's sons had wives.  Besides Mrs. Noah, played fetchingly by Jennifer Connelly, the only female member of the Ark crew was their foundling daughter, played equally fetchingly by Emma Watson.  As a result of that change, the film ends up suggesting that all future generations trace back to Noah's son Shem and Hermoine Granger.  Still, I was not bothered by that nor by the fact that there's a stowaway on the Ark.  And, Noah's homicidal angst at the end of the movie surprised me, but I believe there was a logic to it, too.

So here's the crazy juxtaposition of images that got me!  The additions that spun my head because they seemed just so out of whack!  The critters that seemed so out of place in a film called NOAH were. . . THE STONE MONSTERS.  That's right.  In the movie were monsters made out of stone and mud that were about the size of and moved a lot like a Transformer made from a F250 long bed pickup truck.  The monsters appeared early, and from that moment on,  my head had a tough time getting around this movie.  It was like a Salvador Dali clock had been made to hang out of the Mona Lisa's lips.  (I am not suggesting that Noah is any kind of artwork, but a Salvadore DaVinci combo was the best simile I could come up with.)  The monsters were just so amazingly, jarringly out of place for me.

Russell (Noah) talks with Rocky

Certainly, these monsters were handy.  At first they were Noah's enemies, but pretty soon they joined up with him.  All these huge rock beasts picking up logs and popping them in place really streamlined the building of the ark.  These stone guys were also great at fighting off the swooping hordes.  And they could talk and babysit, too.  Really!

To be fair to the filmmakers, these monsters were supposed to be creatures called Nephilim.  Depending where you read about them, they were either fallen angels or the spawn of fallen angels and human women.  They are mentioned in Genesis 6.  Not as rock monsters, mind you, or as ark builders, but, if I understood it correctly, as some pretty nasty villians who were typical of pre-inundation humanity. Anyhow, in the move, when each Nephilim was swept over and crunched by a horde, his soul was released and sent straight to heaven.

These troublesome, out of place monsters were just too much for me to accept. . .too whacky to allow me to really enjoy the movie.  (Linda liked it a lot.)  The other thing that really spun my head was Russell Crowe's mid-film buzz cut!!  He's playing Noah with long hair and beard, rolling along fine, and suddenly he appears with every hair on his head 1/6 of an inch long.  That really bugged me!  You want me to accept monster, maybe, but who had the clippers?  That's what I want to know! Who?