Right. Once you've watched that, and finished the long pause that I hope will come between the word "Um" and the word "what?", I hope you'll join me in preordering the vast buckets of popcorn that this doubtless catastrophically awesome turkey will demand. This is it, folks, this is the Hollywood singularity: Darren Aronofsky directing Russell Crowe playing Noah with Ray Winstone epitomising all humanity's cockney evil and Emma Watson practically wearing a sign on her head instructing critics to refer to her as "more wooden than the ark she's standing on". This is going to be fun. A disaster of biblical scale. We like watching colossal disasters, which is why they make so many disaster movies. It's also why there are so many disasters in the Bible.
The ancient myths we have inherited served many purposes, but let's not forget they had to entertain. The destruction of Troy, the flood of Gilgamesh, the freezing of the world at Ragnarok: these narratives at some level satisfy our ghoulish love of watching other human beings get slaughtered for no reason they can control. Quite why this is is a question for anthropologists and literary critics: I suspect it might be because it magnifies a thousandfold a suspicion we don't dare to face head-on, that life is random and cruel and pointless. Such a vast scale of unfair slaughter paradoxically makes it easier to bear, even delightful, like getting into fits of laughter at a funeral. I can absolutely see why these stories exist.
The problem is that not everyone thinks of them like I do as just stories. In fact, rather a lot of people have a deep abiding faith in the religion that has its roots in these Bronze Age texts, and given this fact it seems a rather odd choice of movie to make. Because the Noah story to me is one of the moral cruxes of the entire Bible, even though it is usually remembered as a way of teaching kids the names of animals and the alphabet at the same time if you're lucky.
One of my favourite bits of TV ever, God on Trial, features an extraordinary closing monologue from Antony Sher as a rabbi in Auschwitz denouncing God for his crimes. When he gets to the Flood, he asks the blindingly obvious question: What could the people of the earth have done that was so bad as to warrant annihilation? It's a shocking question because it links deeds to punishment. Genesis tells us that the hearts of men were evil, and so God slew them. But that is not how we conceive of justice. Even if we believe in the death penalty, we do so only in the case of murder, and since every human by definition could not be a murderer, the deaths of them all and their innocent children would seem monstrous to us.
And then there's the method of extermination. God could simply stop the hearts of every living creature, but chooses to drown them. Drowning is a terrible way to die. As waters rose, the terrified evil mothers would have run with their new-born babies to higher ground, expending every effort until it became clear the waters would not stop rising and in their exhaustion they and their children would succumb to the slow suffocation of the water. This is not the justice of a merciful God, but one who wishes beings to suffer before they die.
Now, picking holes in the Old Testament is boring and done by boring atheists all over the internet. But this particular story fascinates me because it is the most mythological of the Bible - it is so bleak, absurd and nihilist that it clearly comes from some anguished folk impulse. Indeed the flood narrative is famously common to many cultures. That makes it the hardest to reconcile with the providential Christianity in the latter Testament, basically because they're coming from two different places but need retrospectively to claim to be part of an overarching scheme. This is quite doable as long as you don't focus on the pain and death of the wicked and do focus on the progressive redemption of the sinful, which in a sense begins with the rainbow covenant.
And that is why this film is such an oddity. If you have a hundred million dollars to make a Biblical film, why force attention onto the most ethically uncomfortable moment? Even if the entire human race was made up of gang boss Ray Winstones, all threatening unspeakable things to debtors, we would feel a bit uneasy about watching their complete obliteration. It is possible that there's a fascinating counter-argument to all this in the film itself. It will be interesting to see.
But am I the only one who feels that if you wanted to point out the true horror in the Old Testament to as many people as possible, the best way would be to make a massive Hollywood blockbuster that appeared to take itself very seriously? Fascinatingly, it is written by John Logan, who has impressive pedigree. Just how mischievous can a massive film get?
Come for the implosion of Russell Crowe's credibility,
stay for the stone-cold exploration of genocide
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