Noah: new film on the Great Flood challenges viewers

(Vatican Radio) Darren Aronofsky’s biblical epic, Noah, opens in theatres across the United States on Friday. The film critic and founder of the Decent Films Guide (decentfilms.com), Steven D. Greydanus, offered an appraisal of the film for the National Catholic Register (ncregister.com). “Noah,” he writes there, “pays its source material a rare compliment: It takes Genesis seriously as a landmark of world literature and ancient moral reflection, and a worthy source of artistic inspiration in our day.”

That the film is visually stunning is evident even from the pre-release teaser trailers. The cast is more than simply star-studded: it includes Oscar-winner Sir Anthony Hopkins, veteran character actor Ray Winstone (perhaps best known for his turn as a mob enforcer in 2006’s The Departed), and Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame; the film also reunites Oscar-winners Russel Crowe and Jennifer Connelly (who appeared together in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind) as Noah and his wife, Naameh.

Noah, however, is not your garden-variety Bible movie. “It is something more vital, surprising and confounding,” writes Greydanus in his Register piece, “a work of art and imagination that makes this most familiar of tales strange and new: at times illuminating the text, at times stretching it to the breaking point, at times inviting cross-examination and critique.” This was an idea on which he elaborated in an exclusive interview with Vatican Radio. “Aronofsky is an uncompromising filmmaker,” he said. “Too many filmmakers are just pandering to the audience – but at the same time, there’s no question: this movie is going to be off-putting to many Christian viewers.”

Many, perhaps, though by no means, all. “I think that people who are open to taking a new look at the story of Noah as a work of literature,” Greydanus said, “…open to looking at the story of the flood as a story, and how that story has been told in the Bible, how it has been told in other sources, how it’s being told here – if you’re willing to allow your assumptions about that story to be challenged, and if you’re willing to watch a movie where you’re not necessarily going to accept everything, a movie that you can argue with…then I think you might find [Noah] to be one of the more fascinating movies that comes out this year.”

Listen to Steven D. Greydanus’s extended conversation with Chris Altieri: