Movie News: Why Noah’s Criticism May Be Unfounded By Christians

I feel dishonest. Noah is “not” a Christian film…it’s not even a Jewish film. In fact, some may claim it’s not even a religious film….rather, it’s an artistic story about a very memorable biblical character. So why would it be proclaimed as a great Christian film? Theology states that Christianity and really Judaism did not exist at the time. Really, religion was kind of new. The people in Noah’s time could believe in a God or creator, but by no means were they saying what type of religion they were because there wasn’t one to speak of as much as we’d think there was.

Noah was an old man during the time God spoke to him, according to the biblical text. In fact, he was around 600 years old by the time of the great flood. In the depiction of the movie “Noah”, the director and writer of the film Darren Aronofsky didn’t want to tell people that the movie was a Christian film….he wanted it to just be a film about a biblical character. The reason for this, is because Noah could be artistically used well if there was room to use him with ideas that could make sense for the time.

There has been a lot of criticism on the film, of which may need to be addressed. Some are crazy, but other material may need to be looked into.

1.) God’s name is never spoken in Noah

This is accurate, the name of “God” is never spoken in Noah. This is for a reason. Historically, the people of the time never spoke the name of God really. They referred to him as “Yahweh”, “he” or “say”. So to make the movie accurate from a historical perspective, they couldn’t use the name of God in the film. It simply would not have worked from a detail perspective. In fact, the bible itself does not have the people in Noah’s time speak the name of God. The bible talks about how “The Lord said unto Noah”. but it never claimed “Noah said that the Lord spoke to him”. There is an extreme difference between the two. So if this is a complaint, it should be dismissed immediately as it simply does not hold ground.

2.) The big budget made the movie too Hollywood

Noah had a $150 million budget. This was for several materials, such as the special effects and actors. It was speculated that Noah would do well at the box office. In order to do well, the movie has to make $150 million back or more. So Noah needed to be good to do that, therefore acting had to be great. The actors of the film are brilliant from the title character of Noah being played by Russel Crowe to younger actors being in the film such as Emma Watson and Logan Lerman who played Lia and Ham respectfully.

The studio was smart to grab great actors and spend more money, as it gave us a better product overall. So while Hollywood has given us a different take on the story of Noah, it still was smart in how it presented the film.

3.) The movie is not accurate

There has not been a movie made by Hollywood or any other Christian affiliated organization that has presented a fully accurate depiction of any story in the bible. This is simply because it would be impossible to do. While you can use parts of the bible to make the film good, you simply cannot make the film completely accurate as things are needed for the film to work. Even the cartoon films can only do so much with what the bible gives.

Due to this, it would be wrong to say that Noah broke any rules from a creative or biblical perspective. A movie is simply that. Hilariously the movie is not based on a “Christian” story. Noah was not a Christian man, he was a God believing man who loved the Lord and did as he was asked by him. Without Christianity, Noah could not be such. Therefore, this Christian film is not what Christians would like it to be. So why would a Christian offended when the basis was never about the Christian faith, but simply about an incredible man and his story of what God told him to do?

4.) This could never bring the word of God to people due to it’s inaccuracies

This is potentially the worst criticism. For a movie to be good, it needs to start conversation. I spoke with a minister about this before I wrote on the article. He made a great point. If we are talking about Noah and the online world is all abuzz on the film, it would make sense that someone somewhere will ask a minister about Noah. They may even look at a bible. Who knows, they might even go to church to hear about this Noah guy and maybe Abraham too. What about Jesus? He could be cool to know about too. After some time, the story of Noah as told by Hollywood ended up making someone potentially invest time in Christianity. So really, how could a movie be bad that is doing that?

Noah is a different take to a lot of biblical films that have come out recently or that are scheduled to do so. God’s Not Dead has been panned by critics for it’s bias to one side, meanwhile Noah has been beloved by critics thus far who have seen it due to it’s little bias and focus on the story of Noah himself. At the end of the day, people will choose to feel how they want about the movie. However, Hollywood if nothing else brought us a beautiful product and for that, we should thank them.