Before the flood: Noah reaches the screen

Before the (film) flood: biblical hero or a conflicted superhero?

 The case of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, to be released in the U.S. at the end of March, can be tackled from at least two different but complementary perspectives. 

One is the numbers’ perspective.  It is related to the stunning box-office success of The Passion of the Christ in 2004, that opened the door to projects interested in capturing that same massive audience, which in the US can be characterized as Christian, conservative, evangelical.  The film’s success was also linked to an innovative marketing campaign that connected with a mass audience intimately familiar with the story.  Subsequent films did not yield the box-office the studios had expected, like The Nativity Story (2006).  Noah is going after the audience that responded warmly to Mel Gibson’s
film.

The other perspective has to do with storytelling and poetic license – the esthetic approach. Noah is one of the great heroes of the Hebrew Scriptures, together with Moses and David.  They can - and have - received the ‘hero’ treatment in the Hollywood tradition of the great spectacles.  Cecil B. De Mille’s two versions of Moses in The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956) are emblematic of this treatment: the films offer a ‘literal’ approach to story and characters, using cutting-edge special effects at the time.  The 1950s and 60s biblical epics function the same way, by treading on a familiar territory – whether historical in the films about Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), or imaginative fictionalizations, like Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953) and Ben-Hur (1959).  Biblical stories go back to the beginnings of Hollywood, with D.W.Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which makes the teachings and Passion of Christ the moral linchpin of the film.

In my opinion, this literal approach – which also implies a biblical interpretation traditionally agreed upon by the Jewish and Christian faithful – also coincided with the shared moral and cultural landscape, rooted in Judeo-Christian values, in place until the fractures of the 1960s.   There is no such shared consensus today.  That’s why a film such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) was polemical:  it proposed a radical interpretation of the human side of the Lord, an ordinary man without a mission, and Saint Paul as a political operator.  The transcendental dimension of Christ, the Son of God, did not exist.

According to what I have read, Noah offers not only a non-traditional interpretation, but also a modern context and agenda - the environment and overpopulation – that may err on the side of secularism, putting a question mark on the religious dimension of the story.  Painting Noah as a conflicted hero, along the lines of the recent Batman, Superman and Thor, will not endear the film to audiences with set expectations about story, character and above all, meaning.

This Noah seems more pitched at the youth quadrant – The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Avatar folks – with its state-of-the art special effects and self-doubting superheroes.

There might be a disconnect between the faith-based audience Paramount studios wants to reach, and a film that is primarily an epic struggle of survival and family.  The parallel with last year’s World War Z is relevant, since before this expensive film opened, its potential box-office success was a big unknown for Paramount.

Personally, I am intrigued by the handling of Noah’s story, a topic that is integral to the larger story of God’s covenant with humankind – at the Judeo-Christian heart of the Western civilization.  I am also curious to see if the film understands Noah – if not literally, as director Aronofsky has noted – as an emblematic human figure engaged in a personal relationship with a God who created us to his image and resemblance.