Ed's Review Dot Com

Paramount Pictures, Regency Enterprises, Protozoa Pictures,

Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, Anthony Hopkins

Noah (Russell Crowe) lives in a world where Cain’s descendants have taken over most of that land and killed off most of Seth’s descendants. Only Noah’s family, his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and his 3 sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth are living in terror of the descendants of Cain. After Noah has a dream about the destruction of the earth by flood, he visits his grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) to seek guidance in his path of building the ark and saving the animals, two by two in a blockbuster retelling of the Noah’s Ark story that has a lot of poetic license!

Christian people are all up in arms about this movie! Boy do they hate it. For that reason you’re going to find a LOT of hate reviews. This is because it is very, very loosely based on the commonly known Biblical story of Noah and the Ark. There are many things that don’t even come close to the Bible version, although there is a lot more going on in the Bible version that is commonly discussed. After the ark lands, and some time has passed there is a very cryptic event told (Genesis Chapter 9) about Noah and Ham. I would assume that if you are one that takes the Biblical story literally, it was written a thousand or more years later, and most likely the verbal version of the story was well known among the descendants of Abraham. For that reason, and for sensibility it may not have all been written down. Likewise, if you, like some, want to write that whole chapter off as allegorical and having a totally different meaning, then why not the rest of the story? So my complaint would not be so much based upon this point of the story, but many other points that are seeming way off base. But if you take the historical telling of the story aside and just watch the movie as just one take on the story, it really is a beautiful movie. The character of Noah aside, Russell Crowe does a masterful job of playing the role. The rest of the main characters are also very well done. There are some strange rock monsters that have a major portion of the movie, and goodness knows where that came from, but I thought they were nicely done. Many people hated them as well, but they have a purpose and I thought they played it pretty well. Granted it was a strange choice to add them to this story, but hey, in a fantasy I guess anything goes. It’s LONG. Very long! Going on 3 hours long, but it wasn’t too long for me. Turn to the religion channel on your TV for a cartoon version of Noah, not this, but as a major film, it was beautiful. The locations were spectacular, the CGI was amazing, and the idea of putting all the animals to sleep surely saved a lot of effort in dealing with the sanitation issues neatly.

Basically if you take the words of the Bible as fact, avoid this film like the plague. But if you’re willing to put aside the Biblical story and want to watch a really beautiful fantasy movie, like me, you’ll probably enjoy this film. It’s fantasy, but not for everyone.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog