Director Darren Aronofsky’s action-packed film adaptation of Noah’s Ark is set it hit theaters March 28. But, as Glenn reported last month, it looks like Noah might not the Biblically based biopic some may have been expecting. Why? Well, for starters, Noah is portrayed as a drunk who is worried about environmental issues. With the release date just around the corner, The Hollywood Reporter has offered one of the first reviews of the film, and it’s not looking good.
“I was turning around on [the film] because… I saw the preview and it looks amazing. It looks great. Maybe I'll just go see it and ignoring the other stuff,” Stu said on radio this morning. “After reading the review, I don't think I can get over it.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy offers this analysis:
Darren Aronofsky wrestles one of scripture's most primal stories to the ground and extracts something vital and audacious, while also pushing some aggressive environmentalism, in Noah. Whereas for a century most Hollywood filmmakers have tread carefully and respectfully when tackling biblical topics in big-budget epics aimed at a mass audience, Aronofsky has been daring, digging deep to develop a bold interpretation of a tale which, in the original, offers a lot of room for speculation and invention.
[…]
Noah will rile some for the complete omission of the name “God” from the dialogue, others for its numerous dramatic fabrications and still more for its heavy-handed ecological doomsday messages, which unmistakably mark it as a product of its time.
[…]
The director/co-writer serves notice of his revisionism right away, mutating the opening line of Genesis into, “In the beginning there was nothing.”
Read the entire review HERE.
Glenn likened Noah to Oliver Stone’s biopic JFK, which was produced with a clearly non-historical agenda in mind.
“Oliver Stone made JFK for a reason… to pump into the system the disinformation of the CIA. Now people look at that and say, ‘That's got to be the real story.’ No, that's not the real story. That's not anywhere close to the real story. But people view that movie as fact,” Glenn explained. “This movie, if it becomes successful… our children will look at that as being the Noah story… It is dangerous disinformation. But I haven't seen it nor will I because I think it's a slap in the face.”
If Noah flops, you can bet Hollywood studios will use it as an excuse to stop making religious-themed films. The success of Roma Downey and Mark Burnett’s The Bible miniseries and Son of God feature film, prove there is a desire for this content.
“Look at a movie like son of God, which… [in] one weekend alone it made $26.5 million in its opening weekend,” Pat said.
Regardless of what it means for the future of the genre, Glenn hopes that Noah is “a massive failure.”
“I hope that Noah is a massive failure. I hope it is a massive, massive failure,” Glenn concluded. “The only thing they have you on is eye candy – are you going to go because you want to see what it looked like?”
Front page image courtesy of the AP