Okay, some of us really ought to rethink our antipathy toward this film. Please consider watching
Father Barron’s analysis or
reading it here.
I lost all sympathy for Noah when he let that one poor girl die.
That was horrible indeed. I was mad, too.
It made God out to be an indiscriminate monster in his destruction.
Well, that’s utterly ridiculous to say. For one thing, God did
not tell Noah to let that girl die; she could have been Ham’s wife had things played out differently.
For another, you can’t seriously whine about that scene “making God out to be an indiscriminate monster” and have no qualms about the rest of the Old Testament. You are aware that the Old Testament itself records God giving instructions far more horrific than “let a girl be trampled,” right? Such as not sparing any men, women, or children in certain attacks?
See, this is what I mean. Aronofsky’s film doesn’t whitewash the brutality of such stories (drowning every man, woman, and child on Earth?), and people flip out because they expect Noah to be nice.
Old Testament patriarchs, prophets, and kings were often not nice. Frankly, I’d rather be trampled than drowned.
Besides this , all of Noah’s sons were married before they entered the Ark.
Doesn’t say that. It just says that Noah, his wife, his sons, and his sons’ wives were on the Ark.
Which they technically were in this film. It was a stretching of the text for Ham’s and Japheth’s wives to be in Ila’s womb, but not a contradiction.
I’m okay with that. It’s creative license that’s not thematically contrary to the source material.
The whole idea that humankind was meant to die out after Noah’s family was ridiculous, besides denying God’s promise to Adam and Eve that he would send a deliverer. It didn’t wash with me nor was it true to Scripture.
I agree. Even in the context of this film, Aronofsky’s Noah was mistaken, which was part of the point of his journey as a character. More on this below…
Sure, I can see Noah having some doubts about the future of humanity, but his “zero population growth” concept isn’t a godly one, it’s straight from the pits of hell.
Yes, and that’s part of the drama of the film. Look, no one ever said Noah was infallible. The Bible simply says he was “righteous in his generation.” Confronted with the terrible depravity that caused God to wipe out most of humanity, it’s perfectly understandable that he mistakenly believed none of them were supposed to survive.
What makes Aronofsky’s Noah “righteous” in the Biblical sense is that he never failed to seek and attempt to carry out God’s will, even if he was mistaken about what God’s will is through most of the movie.
As for his relenting and not killing his granddaughters, they played it as a failure to keep to God’s command to wipe out humanity.
Not exactly. Remember the last scene with Noah and Ila, in which she asserted that God left the choice in his hands?
The implication was - and this is a bit of a departure from the source material, sure - that God was leaving the ultimate decision in Noah’s hands.
If even someone as devoted to God as Noah couldn’t see the value of his own granddaughters, if even Noah could be so depraved that he would be willing to kill them, then there really would be no point in keeping humanity alive.
If, on the other hand, he could see the value of these children and let his love for them sway him, then that shows that there’s goodness in humanity that’s worth preserving.
The implication - and yes, this part was obviously not from the source material - was that God was implicitly leaving the final decision in Noah’s hands. When he found he could not kill his granddaughters because he loved them, that was Noah’s de facto decision: humanity lives on.
Ila helped him start to realize this near the end of the film.
The movie does send an underlying message; God is cruel,
God is no more cruel in
Noah than He is in Genesis 6-9.
mankind will always be evil,
No. Noah’s final decision made it clear that humanity was worth saving.
Besides, you don’t think it’s appropriate to depict humanity as depraved in a story whose source material literally has God deciding to wipe out all but eight of us because we’re so evil?
Again, too many of us have a whitewashed, Sunday school version of this story in our heads. If a movie about Noah failed to make us think, “Wow, people are awful,” then it wouldn’t be fitting the source material, in which our terrible wickedness was indeed the cause of our near-total destruction.
I haven’t seen the movie but it sounds like it might be very interesting, I’ll have to check it out. 
