Noah: More than Just an Ark

Title: Noah, More than Just an Ark

Description: Today we are joined by Garry Stevens of the History in the Bible Podcast to talk about the Biblical story of Noah from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. We will use the 2014 film Noah starring Russell Crowe to examine this popular story. We also see how this movie used non-Canonical texts, such as the Book of Enoch. This movie is much more complex and nuanced than any Hollywood movie deserves to be!

Learn More About our Guest:

Garry Stevens of the History in the Bible Podcast
Historyinthebible.com

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Music Provided by:
"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Image Credits:
By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41074894

Begin Transcript:

[00:00:00] This is Beyond the Screen Podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you again for listening to Beyond the Big Screen Podcast, we are a member of the Parthenon podcast network. Of course, a big thanks goes out to Garry Stevens of the history and the Bible podcast links to learn more about Garry and his podcast can be found historyinthebible.com or in the show notes.
Garry is a frequent guest of both beyond the big screen and the history of the papacy. I always enjoy talking to Garry Good friend and I think you will definitely enjoy today's episode. A great way to support beyond the big screen as to leave a rating and review on apple podcasts. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show and help other people learn about beyond the big screen, more about the Parthenon [00:01:00] podcast network found at podcast.com.
You can learn more about beyond the big screen, great movies and stories. So great. They should be movies on Facebook and Twitter by searching for a to Z history. You can contact me there or just send me an email to my email address steve@atozhistorypagedotcom links to all of this and more can be found at beyondthebigscreen.com.
I thank you for joining me again beyond the big screen.
Today, we're going to talk about a movie called Noah, a 2014 movie produced by Darren Aronofsky who brought us movies, such as PI the wrestler, which, um, Garry noted that he liked that. And I liked that movie as well. And several other great movies. The runtime for this movie [00:02:00] was two hours and 17 minutes or forever.
I'm not what sure it was. It was a close call. It starred Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe as Noah. And he's a Countryman of yours. Right. And a fellow Australian. Weekly's a Kiwi, but we claim all new Zealanders as Australian. So yeah. Yeah. He's really a versatile actor. I've really enjoyed just about every movie I've seen him in.
Although he's one of those actors like, um, he's basically the Australian Tom Hanks. He's he's Russell Crowe and every movie. A slightly different Russell Crowe, but he's still Russell Crowe. Yeah. I mean, he almost has the same haircut and every movie, the haircut and the beard that's um, he's Russell Crowe.
Yeah. Then you have Jennifer Conley. Then you have Jennifer Connelly, Noah's wife, Nama and [00:03:00] Connelly. She's an American actress. Then she starred in movies. Very various quality. She won an academy award star opposite Russell Crowe and another Russell Crowe movie. A beautiful mind. Boy, maybe that's another one for the future episode.
And then we have Ray Winstone starring as. Ray Winstone and no, no, no. He stars as a, somebody named tubal Cain who probably doesn't come up, uh, in your memories of Sunday school class, but he's in there and he's really the ultimate bad guy of the movie. He really needs to take a couple of comedic roles, but he's really, he's tight cast as a Cockney gangster and he kind of plays one in this movie.
He never really drops the Cockney accent at all. What did you think about old, um, Ray in this movie? Well, he's a good meaty actor [00:04:00] and he's got a, not very wide range, but the Cockney accent, I mean, listening to it, the more I listened to it, I thought, Hmm. If you'd played it with a Welsh or Scottish accent, it'd be just as inappropriate, but somehow I suppose it sort of would.
But to me, I found it a very thick accent. Whereas the rest of the cast seemed to be playing neutral, you know, trans Atlantic or mid Atlantic accents. Yeah, I would agree you have a, his was, his was out of place for sure. Then we have Emma Watson who had a major role. She played Noah's daughter named Eli.
She's not mentioned at all in an exited, but we'll get into that. She's a British actress and she's really well known for her role in the Harry Potter movie series. Yeah. You didn't think she was very well cast in this movie though. I thought she was too fragile. Pretty much all the other [00:05:00] actors looked like they could actually survive in that environment, in this set cloth, primitive clothing, but Emma Watson, she seemed to me as though she was dying to get to the nearest fashion store, to put on something wispy and dare.
She was a little bit out of her element and this movie. Yeah, the next one, Logan Lurman, he's an up and coming American actor, star them, Percy Jackson movies. And Lurman plays the much maligned son of Noah ham. I thought he did a decent job. Um, and he gets a lot more action. I think in this movie, he kind of over he's gets more play in the movie than say Noah's other sons, sham and JPEG.
Yeah. Yeah. JFF doesn't it doesn't get much of a part at all. That's it? He just sort of hangs around and is noble and helps things. The actor playing him at least was acting, he showed emotion. He had range. He [00:06:00] did things. The other, the other kids just sort of, okay, we'll pick up the paycheck or something and we'll get a little bit more into him, his key into Hamm's character.
But I think I didn't always get where ham was coming from. Also when the Genesis version, I didn't exactly know where Ham's coming from. So maybe Aronofsky did nail that and we have, uh, Anthony Hopkins who stars as Methuselah Noah's grandfather. And I mean, he's the venerable Anglo American actor, I guess you could say it's more of a cameo role, but, um, Methuselah really doesn't appear in the actual Noah story in Genesis, but he has a pretty decent role in this movie.
Anthony Hopkins. He's been in some of the greatest movies of all time, really since his earliest days. So, I mean, you got to cut, uh, you gotta cut the guy a little slack. Yeah. I think in, in the film now, um, [00:07:00] Hopkins plays Methuselah in a slightly distracted way. Doesn't it? It's like Methuselah isn't quite there or he's just had too many magic.
Yeah. I wouldn't say it was so far that Anthony Hopkins, this was a paying the mortgage role. Big. He put more into it than that, but it still, it was, he could, uh, it wasn't, it was more, let's put an, we gotta find a place for Anthony Hopkins. So why not make him Methuselah? Yeah. Yeah. At least he's not a robot or, you know, um, CGI character, like Nick Naulty was as one of the Watchers, which you never even know it.
Yeah. That's true. Yeah. You wouldn't even know that the actors who were doing that, the voices for the Watchers, cause they put them through some sort of synthesize it didn't they to deepen them or something. The main watcher was that was Nick Naulty, which like I said, you would never even have known it.
Would you think you'd want to, [00:08:00] you know, try and put Nick Naulty on the market. The movie was released in late March of 2014 in the United States. And, um, very shortly after worldwide, it had a budget of 125 million, which is really not that off the wall and a box office of, uh, almost 400 million to this point, which is, I, I would assume in Hollywood, a raving success despite the movie, not really making a lot of waves.
Yeah. Uh, that's true. I suppose the, the religious nature of the film, must've attracted a lot of box office. It's, it's a fairly, it's a decent enough film, but you wouldn't, if it had not been a religious film, I'm sure to have only taken in a fraction of that, the things that we had talked about, Garry and I is that this is a tricky movie to talk about because if you're looking at the Noah story, you really have to talk [00:09:00] about Noah, but also.
Tie it into the other flood narratives that are, that fed into what the Noah story became. But there's an additional complication to this, to this movie that maybe you can tell us a little bit about Garry. The big complication is something which probably confused many moviegoers. When they walked into the film, it starts off with a prologue of these angelic beings.
Who've come down to earth to help Adam Neve, not realizing that God doesn't want them to help Adam and Eve. And in return, the angelic beings get turned into basically rock monsters. And I'm sure a lot of the owners was going, what on earth are these ion in the Bible? Where did they come from? In fact, these angelic beings are known as Watchers in the book of first Enoch, the incredibly important.[00:10:00]
work, which was rediscovered in the dead sea scrolls. It's in the Ethiopian Orthodox Canon, and it describes the coming of these angelic beings, watches to earth. Now watch that apparently comes from an Aramaic word and in Aramaic, that word watcher is an exact synonym for angel. So the watches are angels and then trapped on earth and they, they be, the