Not Your Sunday School Noah

Anyone who knows Darren Aronofsky knows that he makes some very strange movies and that he is an atheist. So it’s pretty surprising that he would make a movie about a well-known Bible story like Noah’s Ark. But what was more surprising to me was how enjoyable his movie, Noah, was to watch. Understandably, many evangelicals and other religious people are upset with Aronofsky’s interpretation of this story, but I wanted to take this opportunity to explain why I liked it and what religious people can actually take away from it. WARNING: I will dabble in spoiler territory.

Many religious people are objecting to the creative license that Aronofsky has taken in telling the story of Noah’s ark. In the movie, only one of Noah’s sons is married, there is a stowaway on the ark, and Noah gets help building the ark from some rock creatures/fallen angels. Obviously, the rock creatures are the strangest ingredient in that recipe, but as I was watching the movie, I realized that they served an important purpose: they separate the movie from the source material.

When the religious protest about any of the other deviations that Aronofsky took from the Bible story, he can point to the rock creatures as evidence that he is not intending to faithfully retell a Sunday School story. No, he is using the basic premise that is found in the Bible to explore some ideas and some intercharacter relationships. Once I realized that this movie’s scriptural basis was only slightly greater than that of The Lord of the Rings, I found it much easier to relax and enjoy the story.

The most interesting relationships that the movie has to explore are those between Noah and the rest of his family, and with his God (which is always euphemistically referred to in the movie as “the Creator”). Noah’s divine mission, and his evolving understanding of it, strains the relationships he has with his wife and their sons, and drive him to do some pretty terrible things.

When Ham, Noah’s second son, expresses concern that he doesn’t have a wife to bring on the ark, Noah first urges his son to have faith that the Creator would provide for him. But Noah suddenly comes to believe that his mission isn’t to usher in a new world with virtuous people living in harmony with the creatures of the earth (more on the environmental bent of the movie later), but to usher in a world without people at all. Only one of Noah’s sons, Shem, has a wife and she is barren, and Noah starts to believe that it is the Creator’s will for human kind to end when his youngest son, Japheth, grows old and dies of natural causes.

When Ham struggles to bring a young girl he found to the ark, threatening to upset that plan, Noah allows her to be overtaken by their enemies, and when Ila, Shem’s wife miraculously becomes pregnant, Noah threatens to kill the baby if it is a girl. For a significant chunk of the movie, Noah becomes something other than the good guy, and something very different from what we learn about in Sunday School.

But it does illuminate an important aspect of the Bible story that most of us don’t like to think about, specifically the violence inherent in it. Noah, someone who is depicted as a lover of all living things, is commanded to let countless numbers of people drown even while they beg and scream for him to let them into the ark. That has to take a toll on a good man’s psyche. And as evil as what he intends to do is, he is only doing it out of obedience to the responsibility that he believes that the Creator gave him.

And as irreligious as this film’s creator is, I have to admit that this relationship between Noah and his Creator, and how his unwavering obedience affects his family relationships, taught me something about my relationship to God. Noah does not want to kill his own grandchild. He begs and pleads to not have to do it. But the Creator does not respond to his pleads. I have been in situations before where I didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of direct and specific guidance from God that I wanted. There have been times that I felt like he was ignoring my pleadings, but I’ve come to learn, as the film also portrays, that those are the times that God is trusting me to use my judgement to make the right choice.

Ultimately, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is not a Sunday School lesson, but that doesn’t mean that it is devoid of value. The first five minutes are pretty heavy handed in its environmentalist bent, but it progresses into and concludes with some ideas that are far more complicated than I anticipated. It doesn’t portray human kind as all bad and beyond redemption. In fact, Noah’s great epiphany at the end of the movie is just the opposite. I’m sure that what I took away from the movie is different from what Aronofsky intended and from what the majority of the movie’s audience took away, but I did find something in it to take away. And maybe you could to.

Content note: I recommend checking out this content review before deciding to see the movie.