There are a myriad of concepts shared within the myths of the human race, and chief among them is the idea of the Flood. A mighty, unceasing torrent that the gods sent to sweep aside the deviant civilizations of old, or perhaps merely a random cruelty of a callous world, from the Igigi who sent down a flood to wipe out the disloyal humans, to the story of the god Vishnu, who, in the form of a fish, gave advance warning of a great deluge to the first man, Manu, and advised him to build a boat to carry his family to safety. Perhaps chief amongst all flood myths is the story of Noah, the man who Iehovah, the Abrahamic God, selected to lead the new humanity after the failure of the old. Noah’s story is retold in the 2014 epic religious blockbuster, eponymously titled Noah. While the film paints a thematically different picture from the canon, and takes some broadly varying and often bizarre choices that separate it from its inspirational myths, it’s ultimately a (mostly) overall accurate summarization of the story of Noah and the Flood.
When discussing an adaptation of a story with such monumental cultural significance, it’s very important to compare the original concept to the modern realization. The classical story of Noah, the flood, and the fall of the first draft of humanity, as it were, is told in the Book of Enoch and the Book of Genesis. The seventh chapter of the Book of Enoch tells of Azazel and his fellows, the Watchers, were once ‘sons of heaven’, angels at the side of God, who were enraptured with the mortal women of Earth, and so chose to Fall from Heaven so as to claim the daughters of men for themselves. Two hundred angels Fell to Earth, took the wives they had so desired, and the result of their couplings were the Nephilim, giants who ‘devoured all which the labor of men produced; until it became impossible to feed them’ and eventually became such a threat that the Earth itself ‘reproved the unrighteous’. From there on, the Watchers taught mankind the arts of smithing, sorcery, and the sciences, and yet while the human race was experiencing a golden age of knowledge, they were also committing grand acts of degeneracy and impiety. Man cried out to Heaven for help, and Heaven responded by launching a brutal attack against the Watchers, as well as conjuring a mighty deluge against the ‘reprobates’ of Earth. One man, Noah, was given the responsibility of building a mighty ark to secure his family and two of each animal of Earth, to repopulate the post-drowned world with the righteous and faithful. He followed Heaven’s guidance, and Noah and his family became the progenitors of the modern human race. Interpretations of the world pre-Flood vary, but this story is among the more commonly told tales.
The 2014 movie Noah, on the other hand, makes some very different decisions (or at least chooses to focus on very different plot points or setting details) for the sake of the story that the film’s director, Darren Aronofsky, presumably wanted to tell. There was a spotlight placed on the fact that Noah was a descendant of Seth, the third son of Adam, and the rest of humanity was descended from Cain. There were no instances of magic in the film, whereas in the Book of Enoch there were numerous Watchers with the role of instructing humans in the sorcerous arts. The animals were all sent into a magical hibernation while aboard the ark, which while a convenient choice for a director to make, was never mentioned in the original myths. Tubal-cain was never given the opportunity in Abrahamic lore to enter the ark, and neither were any of the other humans beyond Noah’s family. This decision stood out, as it seemed to entirely exist for the sole purpose of adding fight scenes to make Noah a more conventional action movie. But all in all, those are minor acts of artistic license, hardly worth mentioning in comparison to the more egregious variations.
The more obvious changes to the myth’s canon include the role played by the Watchers. Rather than Fallen angels who became instructors of impropriety to mankind after their Fall, Aronofsky portrays them as Fallen angels who were forcibly placed into rocklike, golemic bodies as punishment for assisting humans who escaped from the Garden of Eden. Rather than chiefs over the Earth, they instead assist Noah in building the ark. There’s also another entirely new concept. The mineral known as ‘zohar’ that the decadent, industrialized cities of Cain’s descendants rely upon plays a significant role throughout the movie. Then there are the truly bizarre alterations. In the original canon, Noah’s sons went aboard with their wives, but in Noah, that is not the case, because Noah, who is portrayed as a rather delusional person throughout the movie, believes that God (or as he’s entirely referred to in this movie, the Creator) wants humanity to die out, and so forbids his sons from reproducing for a significant portion of the film.
That last difference brings us to what seemed to be the strangest variations from the original story of Noah, in that Noah was a complete lunatic throughout most of the movie. First and foremost, and this seems especially relevant, Noah had absolutely no interest in repopulating the Earth in the movie until the very end. Indeed, he held active disdain for the rest of his species, valuing even the animals more than his fellow man, seeing them as more pure than humanity. He gradually became more controlling and unhinged as the film progressed. When Noah went into a nearby tribal community to look for wives for his two unmarried sons (his eldest, Shem, already having claimed a bride), he changed his mind when he saw the inhabitants trading their daughters into slavery for food, and the squalid conditions in which the tribe lived. When he saw this, he decided that the Creator wanted humanity to die out, and forbade his sons from marrying, triggering a dispute with his middle son, Ham, who realized that he will be alone for the rest of his life. These beliefs came to a head when, after the flood had concluded, Shem’s wife realized that she was pregnant. Noah promised that if she gave birth to girls, that he would kill them, to ensure the extinction of humanity. Later on, when Shem and his wife attempted to build a raft to escape the Ark, he burnt the raft so that they would have no hope of escape. When it’s finally revealed that the babies are both girls, Noah marched forward with a knife, preparing to do what he believed the Creator wished him to do…and then when he sees his granddaughters, he just can’t go through with it. Noah almost ended the movie drunk, naked, and alone in a cave, but reconciled with his family at the last minute for a quick, happy Hollywood ending with rainbows and everything, with the whole family knowing their place in the world the Creator intended for them to populate. This entire depiction of Noah is a slap in the face to the wise, respectable preacher of the myths of old, an insult to the man who is one of the Abrahamic faiths’ most respected prophets.
Speaking of God, he was almost entirely absent from this movie. God is debatably the most important character in the story of Noah, and the only role he had in Noah was in the background, as an abstract force responsible for the destruction of contemporary humanity. Rather than God actually speaking to Noah, Noah had to resort to drinking a tea given to him by Methuselah. The most plausible explanation for God’s absence is that Director Aronofsky wanted to avoid the controversy of showing the Abrahamic God on screen, but the issue with that is that it takes away from the story of Noah. Noah was and is meant to be an earnest, faithful servant of God, carrying out his will and rebirthing humanity. By displaying Noah as a fanatic and a zealot who would have been willing to slaughter his infant grandchildren, and God as uncaring and aloof, Aronofsky misinterprets God, Noah, and Abrahamic traditions in general.
Ultimately, Noah is a film that’s accurate in only the very broadest sense. There was a fellow named Noah, he took his family and his animals on an Ark, God sent forth a great deluge to wipe out the decadent human race, and Noah and his family eventually repopulated the Earth. But aside from that, it’s almost entirely an action movie in religious drag, with Aronofsky taking an astonishing amount of creative liberty with one of mankind’s most treasured tales. Noah was clearly not an attempt to replicate the story of the Flood in any accurate way, and while it’s a passable action-fantasy movie, it’s by no means a faithful retelling of Noah’s story.