A flood is upon us.  A destructive flood that will wipe out all of those who don’t carefully read their Bible.  While the Bible does tell of the global flood that happened in Genesis 6, there is a movie that has actually accomplished something.  A movie that has successfully distorted every aspect of the flood, fabricating different elements that never happened.  A movie that has turned a closely embraced narrowly accepted fact into a common myth.

What is this movie that I speak of? This can be none other than the movie Noah, a film released by Paramount Pictures, Regency Enterprises  and Protozoa Pictures.  Noah is a crucially flawed vessel, flooded with biblical inaccuracies and Jewish myths.  But I will get more into that later in the review.  For now, let’s continue.

Noah has received acclaim for its impressive special effects.  But how does it stand up against the blockbusters?  Is Noah a movie that’s capable of staying afloat, or is it a splintered boat that’s destined for the deeps?  Let’s find out.

The movie begins with a young Noah (Dakota Goyo) with his father Lamech (Marton Csokas).  All of a sudden, a raiding army invades Lamech’s land, and Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) kills Lamech.

Many years later, Noah (Russell Crowe) is seen with his sons Shem (Gavin Casalegno) and Ham (Nolan Gross).  After seeing a flower instantly grow from the ground and being haunted by dreams of a flood, Noah travels with his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and his sons to visit his grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins).

On their way to Methuselah, they come across a group of people recently killed.  From this group, there is a survivor named Ila (Skylar Burke).  Noah adopts the barren survivor and are suddenly chased by Tubal-Cain’s men.  They seek refuge with some fallen angels called the Watchers.  The movie explains that the Watchers were forced by the Creator to remain on Earth as stone golems for disobeying him, and helping humans after being banished from the Garden of Eden. Instead of trying to kill the Watchers, Noah befriends them and helps them escape.

When Noah finally meets Methuselah, he is given a seed from Eden.  Noah plants this seed and it instantly creates an entire forest to build the ark.

About eight years later, with the help of the Watchers, the ark is nearly finished.  The rains are about to come and flood the earth.  Ham (Logan Lerman) runs away and tries to find a wife.  Tubal-Cain prepares his army to take the ark for themselves.  Does Ham make it back in time?  Can Noah and the Watchers fend off the ark long enough to escape Tubal-Cain’s army?  To answer those questions, Ham does make it back in time.  Tubal Cain’s army is wiped out by the flood, but there is something else that happens that I do not like.  You will hear it soon enough.

The plot was pretty steady for the course of the whole movie.  You have before the flood, the flood and after the flood.  The pacing was handled quite well.

While the usual characters were in the movie, there were some other characters that were not necessary.  We have Noah, Naameh, Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham and Japheth (Leo McHugh).  There’s also Adam (Adam Griffith), Eve (Ariane Rinehart), Methuselah and Tubal-Cain.  However, there were some unwelcome additions like Ila (Emma Watson) and Na’el (Madison Davenport).  For the characterization, I was not pleased with it at all.  Especially with Noah. I will get to that shortly, when I address everything that is wrong with this movie.

Now while there was very little, if anything at all to like about the movie, brace yourself.  You are about to get flooded with a deluge of reasons why I don’t like the movie.  Without further ado,  let’s begin.  Let’s start with the scene in the beginning of the movie where Tubal-Cain kills Lamech.  In this Bible, this never happened.  It says, plain as day  “After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters.  Altogether, Lamech lived 777 years, and then he died.”  (Genesis 5:30-31)  Tubal-Cain is mentioned in the Bible, but as the son of Zillah, one of Lamech’s two wives.  (Genesis 4:22) Next inaccuracy.  Noah rescues a girl named Ila.  Nowhere in the Bible does it mention the name Ila.  Flowers that instantly sprout out of the ground is not the work of God, but witchcraft.  With the Watchers, they are portrayed as stone golems.  But in the book of Enoch, they are mentioned as the ones that have fathered the Nephilim.  Being entrapped in stone, how can they produce offspring?  And having seen the whole movie, I have not seen a single Nephilim anywhere. Where are the Nephilim?  They were excluded as a director’s decision to show off a computer rendered creature akin to Lord of the Rings. Next one.  Noah has a series of dreams about the flood.  While this may have been the case, God told Noah directly that he was going to destroy the earth.  (Genesis 6:13)  He also gave Noah the dimensions to build the ark.  And with everything regarding Ila, we will ignore everything regarding her for the rest of the movie since the Bible doesn’t mention her.  Her being barren.  Methuselah’s witchcraft in opening her womb. Her becoming Shem’s wife. Her bearing twin girls.  All of this nonsense will be ignored.  Moving on, we have the next mistake.  Tubal-Cain leads his army to take over the ark.  Nowhere in the Bible does it mention some big stand-down between Noah’s family and Tubal-Cain.  And even worse, after losing his army, Tubal-Cain stows away on the ark.  Last time I checked, he was not listed as any of those who entered the ark!  Next blunder.  Noah was criticized for not finding wives for his three sons.  Well, since the movie can’t tell you the truth, I will.  “And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.” (Genesis 7:7)  That’s right.  Every single one of Noah’s sons had a wife!  But Darren Aronofsky’s Noah will tell you that Ila was aboard, pregnant with twin girls.  Noah’s character in the movie is crucially flawed, portraying him as a psychopathic murderer who is too weak to carry out what he believes to be his God-given task.  In the movie, God doesn’t speak to Noah but gives him a puzzle to solve through a few dreams and visions.  As I have stated above,  God DOES speak to Noah directly.  In the movie, Noah calls the animals the “innocents” and his goal is to save all of them and kill all the humans so that creation can be restored to “the way God intended it”.  This greatly undermines the Noah described in the Bible.  Noah is not a psychopath.  In fact, he is described as a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5) and a faithful and just man (Genesis 6:9; Hebrews 11:7).  Next mistake.  Noah shares the creation story with his sons.  He begins the story with  “In the beginning, there was nothing.”  No.  That is completely wrong.  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”  (Genesis 1:1)  If there was nothing, that would assume that there would be no Creator to make the creation.  Moreover,  the words and visuals that I saw during the creation scene are based on the Big Bang, nebular hypothesis and common descent from single-celled creatures to man.  All of these methods pertain to evolution, which would clearly be at odds with how a creator could be involved (unless they are suggesting theistic evolution)  But even if that were the case, the movie’s interpretation of creation would undermine the six days described in Genesis.  Looking at the next mistake, Methuselah is portrayed as a witchdoctor.  And need I say more?  This movie is littered with a bunch of mystical pagan elements.  And the biggest mistake of all is making the movie in the first place.  A movie replete with every mistake that I listed above.  And if you are still reading this, congratulations.  You survived the flood of nitpicks.  Now for some dry land.

How did the movie Noah do in the box office?  The movie is currently grossing $88.3 million domestically and if you were to double the movie’s $125 million production budget,  you would have the international gross of $250.3 million.  Yes, it’s grossing a lot, but it’s like I said in the beginning of this review.  A flood is upon us.  A flood that has taken the country and world by storm.  But you can still be saved from this flood.  How?  By doing yourself a favor and not seeing this movie.  I’ll say it again.  Do NOT see this movie!  Don’t be fooled by its impressive facade of special effects of a realistic ark crashing over the waves.  The seductive allure of stone golems that belong in a Peter Jackson movie.  Because beneath the special effects is a movie carrying a destructive flood of unbiblical ideas, Jewish mysticism, a swarm of inaccuracies and fabricated characters.  What this movie needs is another flood to wipe it off the face of the earth.  I give Noah a 1 out of 5.