Unless you’ve been playing an elaborate, and early, April Fool’s joke on us, I gather a lot of you didn’t care much for Noah.
Plugged In outlets have been awash with angry Noah viewers and even some angry non-Noah viewers who wouldn’t see the movie for a gazillion dollars.
“The movie got NOTHING right except that there was a man named Noah, an ark, a flood, and the people outside the ark perished,” writer gandb wrote yesterday on this blog. “Just like this movie should!”
“This film is a mocking, blasphemous, butchering, occultic, science fiction affront to the God of Genesis on every conceivable level,” someone else wrote to me via email. “This movie should have received the lowest recommendation possible. Seeing this movie will not benefit ANYONE.”
I totally get it. This big-screen Noah is not the story of Noah most of us know and love. I knew that lots and lots of folks were going to be mad when they saw it or heard about what was in it. The film takes something that is, by definition, sacred to us and turns it into something almost unrecognizable. Sure, I found some worthwhile themes within this work of (as another reader, charitysplace, so deftly coined) “biblical speculative fiction.” But the anger? I understand.
I don’t get angry very often, and when it comes to movies, that’s probably a good thing. I see lots of movies worth a little righteous anger, but if I really felt fury on a gut level every time I could or should, I think I’d be in a constant state of exhaustion.
But every now and then, I see a movie that does just tick me off. Project X, which made a minor ripple in 2012, shoves to the front of the line for me. I thought it was horrible. Truly horrible. The film’s only purpose was to throw a hedonistic, irresponsible party that—had it followed any rational, reasonable template—could’ve well killed half the attendees, gotten the other half thrown in jail and left dozens battling various venereal diseases. It’s a movie with loads of bad behavior with an absence of consequences. In my review, the only positive thing I could think to say was about the “acting of Thomas Mann.” It’s a movie I feel seriously Old Testament about.
I can deal with challenging material. But if there’s one thing that sets me off, it’s a movie that exists only, it would seem, to embrace a worldview of complete self-annihilation.
So let me ask you, my good reader, what’s bound to make smoke curl out your ears when you see a movie? Is Noah the worst of the worst for you?
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