"Noah": Hollywood's Most Recent Derision of Christianity

From the talking rock monster angels to the beasts that were killed and eaten on the ark, Hollywood's new motion picture and derivative of one of the most famous Old Testament stories, Noah, is nothing short of a blasphemous joke on Christianity.

For the most part, I am not a fan of movies about Christianity or the Bible; one, because they're usually horribly depicted, and two because Christian directors and producers hire some of the worst actors out there. But when I first saw the trailer for Noah, I was instantly curious. Perhaps it was because growing up, the story of Noah and the ark was one of my favorite Bible stories, or because Emma Watson just happens to be one of my all time favorite actresses- (Russell Crowe isn't too bad himself).

Either way, probably like most Christians young and old, I wanted to see what spin Hollywood would take on this one particularly amazing Bible story.

I sat through the movie, most of the time on the edge of my seat, wondering what was going to happen next. It was somewhat thrilling and strangely enchanting in some scenes; it was an average story about a man built an ark to protect himself and his family from a storm. In the movie, Noah is portrayed as the man in control, an evil man at times who tells his family that they will bury each other once the storm is over because there cannot be any "sinfulness" in the new "Eden" and all of mankind must come to an end. But when Noah and his family are on the ark, Shem's lover, Eila, becomes pregnant. Noah makes a promise to the couple that he will kill the baby if it is a girl and the family develops a hatred for him and his two oldest sons even revise a plot to kill him. Of course, Eila gives birth to not just one, but twin baby girls, and Noah decides to disobey 'The Creator's' command to kill them and spares their little lives.

While watching the movie, I tolerated the talking rock monster angels who protected Noah and his family from Cain's distant relative and his army of meat-eating evil men.

"Rock Monster"

I didn't mind the story line of how Eila became Shem's mate or even wise old Grandfather Methuselah's giving of the seed to Noah to help him grow a forest to build an ark. While some of this never happened in history, from a non-Christian's point of view it made the movie a little more interesting.

However, Hollywood crossed the line as soon as they made the two biggest characters in the story of Noah and the ark look like two heartless villains. For the majority of the movie, I found myself hating Noah, and worse, wondering who in the world 'The Creator' was and why he was allowing innocent people to die.

First of all, the Bible says Noah was a righteous man, and that he was chosen to build the ark because he refused to follow the wicked ways of the world. He loved God and he was faithful to Him.

Genesis 6:9b says, "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time and he walked faithfully with God."

We are given the story of Noah and the ark in the Bible for many reasons, but in my opinion, the most important one is to recognize the importance of obedience. In those days, rain was unheard of, let alone a flood that was going to be big enough to kill every living thing on the planet. God commanded Noah to do something that was crazy to almost everyone around him, but Noah humbly obeyed the Lord anyway. Although he was a sinner, Noah was not evil, he was a patriarch; his faithful story was amazing enough to be recorded down in a book to be preserved for more than two thousand years. Noah was a good man, a man that God deemed as righteous, and an example for Christians to follow. 

But Hollywood couldn't just stop there. God ('The Creator') had to be mocked too. You never see this mysterious creator and you never hear his voice in the movie. He doesn't answer to Noah when he prays to him. So for all we know as the audience is that the creator is probably number one, evil because he let innocent people be slaughtered by the flood and other ways and number two that he is not the controller of the universe because he allowed Noah to make most of the decisions as well as undermine him most of the time. The Creator quickly became the idiot.

To me it's not a coincidence that Noah was regarded as the mean girl in the movie and God was viewed as distant and unsympathetic towards mankind. Why wouldn't Hollywood do that? Why would they want to make God and an incredible Bible story look anything but good?

I always think that maybe these movies will help the cause of Christianity, not hurt it. Or perhaps if someone sees a movie like this, it will plant a seed in them which will cause them to desire to read God's Word.

Hollywood took the beautiful story of Noah and violently twisted it into a tragedy. It was like watching a fairy tale have an ending that wasn't "happily ever after" or seeing the bad guy win. It was taking the truth of the Gospel and turning it into something evil and diminishing.

 It's not a happy film, it doesn't make you feel good. It doesn't teach you or inform you of any truth or "moral" to the story. It does nothing except for make our God look like a peon to millions of people who will sit in comfy seats at the movie theater for the next month and a half or so.

How sad that Hollywood has resorted to insulting God through Bible stories, which by the way, need no embellishments to be entertaining and enchanting and life-changing. How dare they take a sacred, biblical truth and turn it into heresy. How dare they take an Almighty God and display Him as evil.

Sheesh. If you're going to try to re-tell a story, why not tell it the way it was told?