The Promised Land takes a somewhat different approach. It’s a comedy done in the style of mockumentaries like The Office and Parks and Recreation, using humor to highlight the humanity of Moses and his people as they trudge through the desert and get used to the daily grind of life after Egypt.

Moses (The Chosen’s Wasim No’mani) is worn down by the Israelites’ petty complaints. His resentful sister Miriam (a delightfully deadpan Shereen Khan) is irritated by his bubbly wife Zipporah (Tryphena Wade) in a subplot inspired by Numbers 12:1. And his suspicious cousin Korah (Brad Culver) begins to notice there’s something odd about Chisisi (Dav Coretti), an Egyptian who ended up on the wrong side of the Red Sea and is now trying to pass himself off as a Hebrew.

The series currently consists of just one episode, a pilot that covers the events of Exodus 15–18. (It’s now playing on YouTube.) But the producers recently secured $5 million to make five more episodes, which they will start shooting at the end of this month. 

Writer and director Mitch Hudson, who has been an assistant director on The Chosen since it went into production six years ago (he works primarily with the background actors) says he hopes to shoot 40 episodes of The Promised Land. 

But first, he has to get the first season done.

Christianity Today had a chance to speak to Hudson about the series. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Just for starters, I have to confirm: On The Chosen, you are an assistant director, not an assistant to the director?

Yes! Not the director’s assistant, not the assistant to the director, I’m an assistant director. Yeah, that’s funny. I’m not Dallas’s Dwight.

You’ve worked with crowd scenes on The Chosen and now you’re doing your own series about Moses, who’s associated with the proverbial cast of thousands. 

We’re going to do something very special in the first season that will hopefully incorporate hundreds of people. [After the interview, it was announced that fans can volunteer to be extras for an episode called “The Tabernacle.”] Certainly, it’s familiar territory for me after all that we’ve done on The Chosen.

You’ve said that you aren’t reverent toward your characters but you are reverent toward God. But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t have funny lines.

When I read some of God’s conversations with Moses in the Bible, I just want to burst out laughing. Like when the Israelites complain they don’t get to eat any meat and God’s reply is basically, Oh you’ll eat meat. You’ll eat lots of it. You’ll get sick of it (Num. 11:18–20).

I think people can be nervous about depicting biblical characters as people who made mistakes, who did things that were wrong and fell on their faces. Sometimes we think we can’t show the weaknesses of characters in Scripture because somehow that would be disrespectful. They’re in the Bible, and the Bible is holy, and so if they’re in the Bible, then we need to treat them that way too.

But the truth is that God used them because they were people and because they were imperfect, and I’m trying to depict them the way that they are in Scripture—as people who have flaws, as people who do make mistakes but keep trying anyways. Hopefully we find a little bit of connection to them.

As for the conversations between God and Moses, you’re right, there’s definitely some humor in there. 

But those conversations with God and Moses we can’t see—because the documentary crew can’t go there. The documentary crew can’t go up onto the mountain with Moses; they can’t go into the Holy of Holies. So those conversations are private. I’m trying to do that on purpose because I don’t want it to ever be that I’m looping in God with the jokes.

But then when Moses comes back and he’s trying to communicate what God has said, then I can get into the fallibleness, basically, of Moses trying to convince hundreds of thousands of people to listen to him—and he’s not a born leader. That, to me, is naturally very funny.

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You’ve said that you’re looking forward to shooting the Golden Calf episode (Ex. 32), that it’ll be “fun” but also “hurt.” How will you approach that tonal mix? 

Also, the biblical version of that story ends on a very violent note. In the pilot, violence is alluded to but it’s all offscreen or in the past; we don’t really confront it. Is Promised Land going to go there? And if so, how is it going to balance that with the humor?

For me the main thing is trying to never undercut the severity of a moment that’s in the Bible but also recognizing that you can show a piece of a story, not show the whole thing, and still communicate how devastating it was. 

My goal is that this is generally a show you can watch with your family (circumcision jokes aside).

There are also some mystical things in the biblical story—Moses has a glowing face, so he has to wear a veil (Ex. 34:29–35), people see God standing on something like a pavement “bright blue as the sky” on Mount Sinai (Ex. 24:9–10). Maybe some of those things the documentary crew won’t get to see, but you’re at least going to have to deal with the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire (Ex. 13:21–22). 

The scripts that I’ve written for the next five episodes incorporate some of these mystical moments of people seeing God in different ways. God appears as a thunderstorm at the top of the mountain at one point. He also descends upon the tabernacle as a cloud.

For us, it was a question of “How can we portray these elements of the story while also being limited as a documentary crew?” What could we see that everyone else could see? 

There are going to be some fun ways that we incorporate the regular citizens’ perspective on some of these supernatural moments that I think will make them really interesting.

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How easy was it to raise funds for a comedy? With The Chosen, there’s always been a ministry aspect—a lot of people get invested in the show because it’s going to have an “impact.” Is The Promised Land going to have an “impact”? 

I think so often it can be difficult for people to engage with biblical material when it is serious and heavy. I hope to provide an alternative where we can still be engaging with the truth of Scripture but with a more light-hearted tone.

I never knew much about Jethro before I reread the passages that mention him while preparing for the pilot. Now, I’ve obviously made the pilot, but even if I had just seen it, I think I would have a different perspective on that story.

Ultimately, what’s powerful about the story of Moses is that it’s the origin of the framework that Jesus disrupts: “These are the laws; this is how you can make sacrifices to atone for sin.” This sets the stage for Jesus’ arrival.

So my hope is that The Promised Land does lay a bit of a foundation—and also is super fun. 

Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.

The post ‘The Office’ Meets Exodus in ‘The Promised Land’ appeared first on Christianity Today.

Everest focuses on a commercial hiking expedition led by Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), a New Zealander who offered amateurs a chance to climb the tallest mountain in the world and get back down again safely for the princely sum of $65,000. In an early meeting with his clients, Hall tells them he is taking them into the "death zone"—a place so high above sea level that human life cannot survive—and he tells them that they will be "literally dying" while they are up there. But he assures them that he has never lost a customer yet, and that he has taken all the precautions he needs to ensure that he can get the team back down again before any permanent damage is done.

From the beginning, the film lets us know the odds are against Hall. An opening title card tells us that one in four professional climbers have died while climbing Everest, and Hall's clients take note of a memorial to the mountain's victims. But Hall, who pioneered the concept of commercial guiding on Everest, has already taken 19 clients up and down the mountain without a single fatality over the previous four years, and his success has inspired a number of imitators—which causes problems of its own when it turns out that too many people are now trying to cross the same ladder bridges and inch along the same narrow ledges at the same time. Hall calls a meeting to see if the different groups can figure out a way to cooperate or work around each other, but some of them balk at his suggestion—which leads one climber to remark that people shouldn't be competing with each other when the real competition is between all of them and the mountain.

In the end, Hall and most of his clients do make it to the summit, and there is a palpable sense of joy as they celebrate their accomplishment. But then they have to get back down again, and things begin to go wrong: partly because of a sudden storm that comes their way, partly because some of Hall's back-up plans don't pan out, and partly because Hall's own generosity—his willingness to take a struggling client up to the peak an hour or two after everyone was supposed to start going down—turns out to be his tragic flaw.

If there is one lesson that comes through loud and clear in Everest, it is that confidence and bravado are not enough to cheat death. Hall's determination to succeed—and his mildly defiant promise to be home in time for the birth of his daughter ("You try and stop me," he tells his wife when they say goodbye at the airport)—don't guarantee a single thing. Nor does one climber's belief in proving that regular guys can follow impossible dreams. If this were a work of fiction, you might expect such clichés to guarantee a happy, uplifting ending. But this is a true story, and remorseless nature takes whom it takes.

But nature also spares whom it spares: a climber named Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), who was abandoned with several others after it seemed that they had all frozen to death, suddenly wakes up and, to everyone's surprise, staggers down the mountain to catch up with the other survivors. After all the death we have seen, Beck's unexpected revival comes across like a sort of resurrection, the loss of his hands and nose to frostbite notwithstanding. Perhaps not coincidentally, Weathers is the same climber who said in an earlier scene that the reason he climbs mountains is to feel "reborn." The mountain is full of death, but there is more to it than that.

If Everest is a tragedy, then The Walk is a comedy, and in just about every sense of the word. It tells the true story of Phillipe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a French wire-walker who, together with a ragtag team of collaborators, snuck into the World Trade Center towers and strung a wire between their roofs, allowing him to walk back and forth several times 110 stories above the ground. Petit is a somewhat outrageous character, obsessed with pursuing his "art" no matter what obstacles he faces, and (with the exception of a sad coda, which acknowledges what became of the towers decades later) the film plays his escapade for laughs—which is fairly easy to do because, thankfully, nobody was hurt.

Like the mountaineers in Everest, Petit scales great heights and openly defies death—though he tells us in an opening monologue that he never uses that word. Instead, he says that, for him, walking the wire is "life." And the film goes on to tease and celebrate him for the anarchic "arrogance" with which he mounts his daring and illegal feat.

Indeed, The Walk portrays Petit and his quest in almost mythological or even biblical terms. He says it's a providential "sign" when he first sees the pictures of the World Trade Center that spark his quest. At one point during his climactic wire-walk, while refusing to step off the wire and be arrested by the police, he actually lies down on the wire and looks up at the sky, his balancing rod intersecting visually with the wire to form a sort of cross. A seagull comes down and observes him, in a way that is almost reminiscent of the dove at Jesus' baptism—though for Petit, the seagull's arrival signals that it is time to get off the wire. And then, after Petit has returned to terra firma, he is informed that the people of New York—many of whom hated the towers because they looked like ugly giant "filing cabinets"—now love them because of his amazing feat. Petit's girlfriend says that he has given the towers "a soul"; architects and construction workers may have given the towers a body, but Petit, it seems, has given them the breath of life.

While Everest focuses on a death-dealing environment and The Walk focuses on an ambitious man's merry antics, The Martian, based on the science-fiction novel by Andy Weir, strikes a balance somewhere between the two. It begins with a team of astronauts fleeing the surface of Mars when a storm comes and threatens both their habitat and their ability to leave the planet safely. One team member, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), is left behind and presumed dead when the winds toss him aside and a piece of debris destroys his bio-monitor—but it turns out he survived the storm, and so he has to figure out how to live on Mars for the year or two (or three, or four) that it will take for NASA to rescue him.

On one level, the film depicts an uncommonly resourceful individual's determination to survive as he uses his smarts and the materials left on Mars (both by his teammates and by previous, unmanned NASA missions) to grow food, establish a means of communication with the folks back on Earth, and repair the damages sustained by his habitat, all while maintaining his sense of humor. But the film also shows how the efforts to bring Watney home require collaboration and cooperation, from the scientists and administrators who come up with a rescue plan to the astronauts who ultimately return to Mars to carry it out.

Directed by the agnostic but religion-haunted Ridley Scott (Prometheus, Exodus: Gods and Kings), The Martian cannot help but make a few nods to religious belief. In one scene, when he needs to start a small fire, Watney carves some wood from a crucifix left behind by one of his fellow astronauts, and he tells it, "I'm counting on you." In another scene, just before an emergency supply ship is about to launch, the NASA flight director asks his colleague if he believes in God, to which the colleague replies that his father was a Hindu and his mother was a Baptist, so he believes in "something." The flight director says he'll take all the help he can get—but alas, the supply ship blows up soon after liftoff.

If the film is ambivalent about the efficacy of religious belief, it nevertheless expresses a sense of awe that points to a deeper need for purpose that transcends death. Facing the fact that help might not come in time to save him, Watney leaves a message for his parents in which he says he's "dying for something big and beautiful and greater than me." The soundtrack also features a choir singing passages from Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, an ancient Roman poem that aimed to show how the world is moved by natural forces and not by the gods; composer Harry Gregson-Williams says he added this to the film's score because "it creates music that is 'holy' without being specifically religious as such."[1]

Eventually, Watney is rescued, a year and a half after he was stranded, and the film concludes on two different but complementary notes. First, we see Watney back on Earth, preparing to teach some new recruits. "This is space. It does not cooperate," he says. And if they find themselves facing death, as he did, he says they can either accept that or do something about it: "You solve one problem, then you solve the next one, and then the next, and if you solve enough problems, you get to come home."

Then, as the end credits begin, the film shifts to a brand new Mars mission that is just about to launch. As the rocket and its passengers prepare to rise above the ground, The Martian gives every single character who helped save Watney his or her own close-up—some are still working at NASA, others are seen at home with their families—and it sets these images to a disco tune that invites "people all over the world" to "join hands." The montage underscores the film's theme that joy is to be found in community, and that people working together can solve any problem.

And yet, humanity does not get the last word. Once the film has run through all the close-ups, it cuts to a shot of the Earth and pans up into space as the song fades into silence. If that newly launched rocket is out there, we do not see it. Instead, the film ends by reminding us that the world is vastly bigger than us, and is something to be respected. To borrow a line from one of Everest's mountaineers, "The last word always belongs to the mountain." Or, in this case, the depths of space.

Peter T. Chattaway is a freelance film critic and blogger at Patheos.com with a special interest in Bible movies. He lives with his family in Surrey, B.C.

1. Daniel Schweiger, Interview with Harry Gregson-Williams, Film Music Magazine, October 1, 2015. .

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Early on in Exodus: Gods and Kings, there's a scene in which Moses (Christian Bale), who is still an Egyptian prince oblivious to his Hebrew heritage, confronts an Egyptian viceroy named Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn), who is supposed to be building a new city for the Pharaoh but seems to have diverted some of the funds to support his own luxurious lifestyle. Hegep tries to deflect Moses' attention by pointing to the troublesome Hebrew slaves, claiming that he needs more resources to deal with them. As proof of how rebellious these Hebrews are, Hegep says, "Do you know what 'Israelite' means in their own language? 'He who fights with God.' " An annoyed Moses replies, " 'He who wrestles with God.' There's a difference."

It's a key distinction, and one that applies just as much to Ridley Scott's film. Scott, whose self-identification over the years has wavered between "agnostic" and "atheist"—and whose dim view of religion in general has been made abundantly clear in the way he has promoted films like Prometheus and Kingdom of Heaven[1]—doesn't reject the concept or even goodness of God altogether, at least not within this particular story. But he's troubled by God. He's troubled by how God could let people like the Israelites suffer for centuries. And he's troubled by the violence that follows when God does decide to intervene on behalf of the oppressed. And so he wrestles with God, as does the Moses of his film.

That struggle makes Exodus: Gods and Kings interesting in ways that the viewer might not have expected. Indeed, the opening title cards—which past Scott-directed epics have used to establish that their stories take place in a pre-modern world clouded by superstition—are strikingly direct in their claim that "God has not forgotten" the Israelites. This is followed by a scene in which the Pharaoh Seti (John Turturro) consults a soothsayer (Indira Varma) before sending his army into battle—and while Moses and Ramses (Joel Edgerton) both scoff at her prophecy, it does come true in the end.[2] Later, Moses tells Seti that he respects the Pharaoh's faith even though he does not share it; and then, after he has gone into exile and married the shepherd girl Zipporah (Maria Valverde), Moses and his wife disagree about the proper beliefs with which to raise their son.

But the wrestling really begins in earnest when Moses meets God himself, or at least a boy named Malak (played by 11-year-old Isaac Andrews) who speaks as though he were God. Many critics of the film were offended by this unusual bit of casting, but it is actually one of the few ways in which this film sticks closer to the text than most other adaptations of Exodus. The Moses of the Bible witnessed not just a burning bush but an angel who spoke to him there,[3] and the biblical ambiguity surrounding the "Angel of the Lord"—who sometimes seems to be distinct from God but is also sometimes identified with God himself—is reflected in the film, where Malak uses the divine name "I Am" to describe himself in one scene and is then called a "messenger" by Moses in another.[4] What's more, the arguments between Moses and Malak—including Moses' pleas for mercy—are reminiscent of passages like Exodus 32:9-14 and Numbers 14:10-25, where God becomes so angry with the Israelites that he threatens to destroy them all, until Moses talks him out of it.

Sometimes, though, Scott allows the wrestling to get in the way of the story. Unlike the God of the Bible, who gave Moses a detailed set of instructions, Malak doesn't tell Moses just how to go about setting the Hebrews free, so Moses improvises and begins a guerrilla warfare campaign, which only invites reprisals from the Egyptians. Finally Malak shows up, makes a snarky comment about Moses' tactics "failing," and tells Moses to "watch" as the plagues unfold. At no point during the plagues does Moses act as God's representative—the one time he warns Ramses of a plague in person, he does so because he wants "no part" of the disaster that God has planned—and at one point Moses even shouts that God's terrifying displays of power will not "humble" him, which is an odd thing to hear from the person described in Numbers 12:3 as the most humble man on the face of the earth.

Beyond that, the script is peppered with lines that seem to reflect Scott's skepticism more than that of the characters: When Nun (Ben Kingsley), a Hebrew elder and the father of Joshua (Aaron Paul), tells Moses the story of how his birth-mother left him in a basket for the Pharaoh's daughter to find, Moses says dismissively that "it's not even that good a story." Later, when the plague of the firstborn takes Ramses' own son, the grieving Pharaoh asks Moses, "Is this your God? A killer of children? What kind of fanatics worship such a God?" This question is particularly remarkable because, just a few scenes earlier, Ramses had declared his own godhood, as well as his intention to drown all of the Hebrew children.

But then, these are not the only anachronisms in the film. One is struck by how unthinkingly, discordantly modern the dialogue is. Moses tells Zipporah he wants their son to grow up "believing in himself." Zipporah replies that their son can choose his own beliefs some day. Moses tells Ramses the Hebrews should have the same "rights" as Egyptians. Ramses replies that he cannot set the Hebrews free because it would be problematic "from an economic standpoint alone." And throughout the film, Moses refers to God simply as, well, "God," even when addressing the polytheistic Egyptians. Not "I Am That I Am," not "the God of the Hebrews," just plain "God."

These weaknesses in adaptation are compounded by weaknesses in the overall script—not least, the underdeveloped characters. Say what you will about The Ten Commandments, but for all its dated theatricality, it was full of commanding figures who articulated the film's themes in compelling ways. In Exodus, on the other hand, one is constantly distracted by the way significant supporting characters—some of them played by major actors—keep popping up for one or two scenes, only to vanish afterward.

The film isn't an entire loss, however, and what strengths it does have, artistically and theologically, come together at the climax. Moses, having taken the Israelites down an unfamiliar route to the Red Sea in the hope that it will slow Pharaoh's pursuing chariots, resigns himself and the Hebrews to their fate when he sees that the water is deeper than he expected, and he goes to sleep that night confessing to God that he has let everyone down. The next morning he wakes up to find that the water is receding, and he realizes that God is intervening on behalf of the Hebrews once again—and this time, God is intervening in a positive way that will allow the Hebrews to escape the Egyptians for good, rather than in a way that necessarily causes death and destruction (though the water will return in the form of a giant tsunami, and Pharaoh's chariots will be in the way of it when it does).

Moses, moved by this discovery, turns to the Israelites and professes his faith with a deeper conviction than we have seen from him before, and the music swells triumphantly as they follow him across the wet seabed. After two hours plus of wrestling with God, the film finally turns on a moment of answered prayer.You get the feeling that Scott, for all his professions of disbelief, can imagine what it would be like to find out, to his surprise, that God was looking out for him all along—and that is no small thing. Too bad this one scene can't compensate for all the poorly executed scenes that preceded it.

—Peter T. Chattaway

1. Indeed, Scott first revealed that he was making a movie about Moses mere seconds after he declared, in a June 2012 interview promoting Prometheus, that "the biggest source of evil is of course religion" (http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/spitznagel/ridley?-scott-prometheus-interview-9423167).

2. Some Christians might object to the film showing a glimmer of truth in the pagan Egyptian religion, but the book of Exodus does say that the Egyptian magicians were able to replicate some of the miracles performed by Moses.

3. Exodus 3:2; cf. Acts 7:30-37. "Malak" is a Semitic word that means both "messenger" and "angel."

4. See, e.g., Genesis 16:7-13, Judges 13:3-22, etc.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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I think that's an important question. Last year saw two major Hollywood-produced epics (Noah and Exodus) plus Son of God, an edited-down version of The Bible TV miniseries. I'm not even sure how many are slated for 2015, but I know for certain that there are multiple adaptations from the Old and New Testaments en route, a sort of revival of the “sword-and-sandal” mid-20th century heyday. (That spate of biblical epics is far more complicated than we often assume; I wrote about it six years ago for Christianity Today.) If the subject interests you, the best person I know to read is our contributor Peter Chattaway, whose blog is a treasure trove of information on Bible movies past and present. I don't need to tell you that the reception of Noah and Exodus was mixed from Christians, with everything from four-star reviews to accusations of heresy. That means the students' question is important for more than just a class assignment. I'm not a theologian or a philosopher, but here is how I think about it. (Please forgive my lousy Greek.) First, I have to think about what a work of art is. The definition I've been working with for some time now is this: art is the cultural artifact—the thing that humans make—that requires both maker and audience in order to complete it. It has both form and content. More on that in a moment. This isn't a definition of good art, mind you—just art generally. But it suggests that if I make a painting and hide it under my bed, it isn't a “work of art” yet, because someone else needs to view it and invest meaning in it. On the other hand, a picture a little girl paints and gives to her mother is a work of art, because the girl invested meaning in the painting, and so did her mother (and probably anyone else who sees it on her mother's office wall). That investment from both maker and creator is what turns it from “a piece of paper with paint on it” to art.

(Obviously there's the question of whether a person can have an “audience of one,” perhaps God or herself, and I haven't worked that out quite yet. Which is why I'm not much of a philosopher!) The maker/audience piece is just half the definition, though. Many have suggested that a work of art must have both form and content. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis calls content Logos and form Poiema. “It is only by being also a Poeima,” Lewis says, “that a Logos becomes a work of literary art at all.” In his essay “Art Needs No Justification,” Francis Schaeffer's friend Hans Rookmaaker calls these communication and form. This is by no means a Christian idea; you'll find it in many if not most aesthetic philosophers. So a work of art has a maker and audience, and has both Logos and Poiema. This all seems pretty obvious, but it blew my mind when I started thinking about them in terms of the story of the Bible. Two of the most important doctrines to Christians are Creation and Incarnation. In Creation, God calls the world into existence; in the Incarnation, God becomes a man. God speaks, and the world comes into being; God takes on flesh, and the world is redeemed. What we're saying, in essence, when we talk about the doctrine of creation is that God uses words to speak content, or Logos: “Let there be light,” he says. And then light takes shape—God's Logos about what ought to be in the world takes on a Poiema. Light, darkness, sun, moon, stars, animals, even people all take beautiful shape when God speaks it. (And God only says it is “very good” after it takes shape. He doesn't think the ideas are good until then.)

The doctrine of the Incarnation is even more explicit. John tells us in the beginning of his gospel that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” The actual Greek says that the Logos became flesh, which means that it took on the shape, the form, of a man. Jesus took on a particular shape in a particular time and a particular country. He became a human man born into a family in Israel during the time of Roman rule. This is not abstraction: it is among us. To me, these doctrines taken together seem to indicate two things. First, because we humans are made in God's image, we can also take Logos and help it become “also a Poeima,” in Lewis's words. We can come up with an idea or a story, then have it take shape: tell it in words, paint it, sing it, even make a movie. Second, because the Word took on flesh, we too can imitate him in temporarily taking on someone else's flesh. Not literally, obviously, but through empathetic identification with another person, walking in their shoes for a while. Because art expresses a particular artist's view of the world, it's recognized by psychologists, philosophers, social theorists, and many others as one of the best ways to temporarily take on someone else's flesh. Reading and experiencing others' views of the world helps us enlarge our own. But like Christ, we don't lose our individual identities—Jesus didn't become less God when he put on human flesh. (And note that the Bible indicates that Christ remains in his human body now, now in its perfect resurrected state.) Instead of losing our identities in experiencing an artist's viewpoint on the world through their art, we grow larger—at least, we do if the artwork will let us in. Lewis puts it this way: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself . . . Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself, and am never more myself than when I do.”

So I think our perspective as Christians interacting with art and living in light of Scripture is that we need to think about four things: the artist; the Logos of the work; the Poiema of the work; and ourselves. When it comes to biblical epics, this is especially helpful for me. First, I think of the artist, and how I'm meant to interact with him. I take from the Bible that first I'm to recognize that anyone making a creative work is exercising (in some way) their status as a human made in the image of God, who is imitating him through pouring Logos into Poiema. That's something to celebrate. I also, through the Incarnation, understand that to submit myself to a work of art is to submit myself in some way to the artist's particular experience of being human. Especially if she's done a good job, what I experience, then, is her particular vision of the world. I'm listening to the story she wants to tell, looking at the world through her eyes. I may not like it, or it may be different from mine (and therefore quite uncomfortable to me), but if I'm doing my job as a follower of Christ in loving my neighbor, then I'm going to at least give her the benefit of the doubt. The second part is thinking about the Logos of the work—its content and its (obvious, stated) message. In Romeo and Juliet, the logos is a story about star-crossed lovers, as well as a message of some kind about love and death. I can—actually, I must—evaluate the Logos of the work of art. It's often the more obvious element of the work, the one that's easy to recognize (often because in movies characters tend to stand up and give speeches about the Logos). And I can say things like “this Logos is not true,” or “this Logos is not accurate,” or “this Logos is harmful to viewers.” A lot of Christian critics have stopped at the Logos and not continued into the third part: the Poiema. This is not a side note or less important. In fact, it may in some ways be more important, because while the Logos of a work of art might hit us in the rational register (in our brains and understanding), the Poiema, philosophers suggest, hits us in the “aesthetic” register, which is something more in our bodies, and something that's harder to recognize. Have you ever felt ill watching a movie or reading a book? Or felt caught up in a romance's swelling music? Or said that something “really moved” you? You're using aesthetic language, and that's what Poeima is.

When Marshall McLuhan famously declared that “the medium is the message,” this is what he was getting at: a medium, the thing in which the message is embodied, can do as much to us as viewers as the message itself, or even more. It can even contradict its message. A film about the love of God that suggests in its actual form that Christians ought to not like some people is contradicting its own message. But C. S. Lewis suggests (as do I, and many others like Schaeffer and Rookmaaker) that we don't have to agree with the Logos of a work of art to admire and praise its Poiema. That is, I may believe that the Logos of a work of art is dead wrong, but I can still recognize its artistry and craftsmanship. Being able to recognize that does require study and humility, but it's an important thing. (The people who have helped me most on this point have been the critics I've read who talk about form.) Finally, I have to think about my own reaction to a work of art, since I'm what takes something to being “art.” Did I feel like the work provoked some kind of emotional reaction in me? Did I think it worked as whatever it was (a painting, a poem, a film)? Did it take the time to be something new or fresh, or did it retread tropes I've seen before? Did I like it? All of these elements are part of processing, responding to, and viewing biblical epic films, as much as anything else. I start with the creator: what do I learn about him or her through this film? How does that help me understand someone else better? (I personally find that reading interviews helps me in that endeavor.) Then I think about the content. Do I agree or disagree with the message that is present? In biblical films, the question is often whether it deviates from the account in Scripture—an important question, to be certain. But Scripture is not a screenplay, so one of the most important questions here is whether the story stays faithful to the spirit of the original. This requires us to carefully study the Scripture passage in question and understand not just the events it recounts, but also how they fit into the narrative of the whole story of redemption, and what purpose God has in retelling that particular story (after all, there are plenty he elected to leave out—John tells us as much in his gospel). Next, I think about the form. Is this an imaginative, skillfully-made film? Did the filmmaker try to make me see the story in a new way? Did he use all the tools at his disposal in his chosen medium in imaginative ways? For filmmakers, this includes things like acting and writing, and also cinematography, special effects, music, editing—all the things for which we give Oscars. Did he try to make something new, or just settle for the old vocabulary? Finally, I think about my reaction. What did this film move me to do? Did it move me to appreciate the story in a new way? Did I cry? Laugh? Think? Feel?

(Left to right) Jennifer Connelly is Naameh and Russell Crowe is Noah in NOAH from Paramount Pictures and Regency Enterprises.

In my view, any movie (and especially a biblical epic) fails or at least is mediocre if it recounts the story to me blow-by-blow, exactly how I know it happened. Why bother with the movie then? Instead, I think a good biblical epic is one that takes the text seriously and respectfully—it is the Word of God, after all—but then imagines it in a way that makes me see an old story in a new way. It pulls out the themes that are there on the page, but envisions biblical characters as living, breathing humans, with flaws and desires, failures and triumphs, instead of overly perfect, holy beings (even Jesus himself was tempted). It makes me love God's creation and God's work of the Incarnation and, maybe most importantly, the humans he made in new ways. It invites me in to have my own experience with the film, never tying things up so neatly that I'm left without any work to do (and so not letting itself take shape as a work of art). That's a successful biblical epic, in light of Scripture.

(Not to stir up old controversies, but this is why I persist in liking Darren Aronofsky's Noah so much. I learned a lot about Aronofsky—he is interested in Jewish tradition, in the transcendent and supernatural, in how biblical themes resonate across stories, and in how people become redeemed; I saw Noah's story as one about redemption, which never really occurred to me before; I saw an imagined view of the beauty of an antediluvian world; and I was personally moved.)

I also persist in thinking that any criticism of a film that merely relies on Logos is inherently unscriptural, in that it denies the world the way God made it: it acts as if he made a world that is mostly Logos, no Poiema, and that the only thing that matters is Logos. But here we are: humans have rational faculties, and also bodies, emotions, and histories. To deny that is not a Christian act of criticism. It's Gnostic.

These aren't checkboxes, of course. Watching and responding to films isn't an easy task for anyone (especially critics). Actually, it's hard work. But I can only start to say meaningful things—as a critic, as an audience member, and as a Christian, too—if I am thinking about the film as a work of art.

It seems like both creating the world and taking on a human body were also pretty hard tasks, so if I'm wanting to watch and respond to films well—a thing that brings me much pleasure, since it's something I was created to do—then that hard work is probably the least I can do.

The post The Word, the Flesh, and the Biblical Epic appeared first on Christianity Today.

In Son of God, which came out in late February and grossed more than $56 million during its first month, the apostle John recites a slightly modified version of the first chapter of his Gospel. It emphasizes both Jesus' preexistence and his presence at specific Old Testament scenes. Each scene is illustrated with a clip from last year's hit History Channel miniseries The Bible.

Down the hall, the title sequence for Noah—which earned $44 million when it opened in late March—mixes the story of the Fall and Cain's murder of Abel with apocryphal elements such as a group of fallen angels known as the Watchers, who are described in the noncanonical Book of Enoch.

Those aren't the only Bible films hitting the big screen in 2014. In December, Ridley Scott, who revived the ancient epic in secular form with Gladiator, will put the finishing touches on Exodus: Gods and Kings, a 3D movie starring Christian Bale as Moses.

Together, the three films—produced by very different filmmakers with very different sensibilities—would seem to herald the return of a long-neglected genre. But the films themselves don't necessarily resemble Bible movies of the past, and it's not yet clear whether they will inspire more in the near future.

Films based on the Bible were very popular during the silent era, when dramatic realism took a back seat to iconography. They regained popularity during the postwar boom, reaching their peak with the 1959 film Ben-Hur and its record 11 Academy Award wins.

But the genre faded in the 1960s as audiences turned to spy movies and science fiction. While there has been a steady stream of Bible stories on television ever since, the genre has mostly lain dormant on the big screen, certainly where major studios are concerned.

The Bible films that have come out over the past few decades have tended to be flops (1985's King David) or controversial arthouse films (1988's The Last Temptation of Christ). The Prince of Egypt (1998) was the top-grossing non-Disney cartoon ever for a short while, but it was animated and thus not perceived as a Bible epic per se.

Even Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which grossed a surprising $611 million worldwide a decade ago, was made and distributed independently without involving the major studios. It had a budget of only $30 million, a pittance by modern Hollywood standards.

Ten years after The Passion's preeminence, several studios have begun to develop new big-budget Bible movies—and the results are finally appearing in cinemas everywhere. But not without hitting bumps and hurdles along the way.

After 'The Passion' Is Gone

Jonathan Bock is founder and president of Grace Hill Media, a company that markets Hollywood films to faith-based audiences. He says the major studios have been out of the Bible-epic business for so long that, when The Passion turned out to be a huge hit, they didn't have anything in the pipeline to hurry into production.

In addition, they had no idea what any given Bible movie could expect to earn from the usual revenue streams: domestic, foreign, theatrical, DVD, and so on.

"So the studios did what smart businessmen do," says Bock. "They toe dipped. They took small bets . . . to figure out how the game works."

Initially that meant setting up "niche" labels such as FoxFaith, a branch of the Fox home entertainment division that arranged theatrical releases for modestly budgeted independent films, such as One Night with the King (2006), based on the Book of Esther.

One "maverick" studio, New Line Cinema, took the plunge and made a Bible movie of its own. The Nativity Story, produced for $35 million and released in time for Christmas 2006, grossed only $46 million worldwide, mostly generated in the United States.

While the film wasn't a flop exactly, it certainly wasn't a hit, either. Some studio executives began to wonder if The Passion had been a fluke.

"I remember feeling like a brake [was] being put on," says Stuart Hazeldine, a screenwriter who at the time was working on a big-budget adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost for Warner Brothers. "There was a lot of head-scratching around Hollywood, people trying to figure out why this one film did well and the other film not so well."

At the time, some people argued that The Nativity Story had played things too safe, offering a Hallmark version of the birth of Christ rather than mimicking the gritty, bold artistic vision that The Passion had offered. So the studios kept developing other films, especially those that could pack in lots of action that might appeal to a broad audience. Yet most of these films have not actually been made.

J. Michael Straczynski, best known for creating the science-fiction TV series Babylon 5, wrote a script about King David for Universal. Benedict Fitzgerald, who cowrote The Passion, cowrote a screenplay about the Virgin Mary for mgm. Scott Derrickson, a Christian who specializes in spiritually tinged horror films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was hired to work on a film about Goliath for Relativity. And two studios, Warner and Fox, set up rival Moses projects: Gods and Kings, which briefly had Steven Spielberg attached to direct, and this year's Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Meanwhile, Darren Aronofsky, a filmmaker known for dark, stylish independent films (see CT's interview), was trying to get a movie about Noah off the ground that would highlight the apocalyptic aspects of the story, rather than the cuddly-zoo elements that have dominated earlier films. He says studio executives had no idea what he was talking about when he first pitched the project over a decade ago, pre-Passion.

"The biblical epic as a genre was really dead and very hard to imagine," he toldCT. "There were a lot of jokes when we went around to the different studio heads, because they saw Noah as a comedy and silly subject matter. It took Hollywood a long time to get the idea: 'Oh wow, this is a really interesting genre.'"

Aronofsky finally got the go-ahead to make the film when Black Swan, a 2010 psychological thriller he produced for only $13 million, grossed $329 million worldwide and earned an Oscar for its star, Natalie Portman. That success coincided with Hollywood's willingness to finally commit huge resources to telling a biblical story. So in 2012, Paramount announced it would produce Noah at a reported cost of $125 million.

One year later, while Noah was in editing, Fox, which had been developing Exodus: Gods and Kings since 2009, announced that it was going ahead with its $150 million Moses movie.

Around that time, Fox also revealed that it would distribute Son of God, a full-length film distilled from the Jesus-themed episodes of The Bible, which had just become one of the top-rated cable TV shows and top-selling TV-based DVDs of all time.

Hazeldine, who worked on the other Moses film, Gods and Kings, says the studios are turning to Bible stories now because, as they focus more on making big-budget "event" movies, they tend to rely on stories with a built-in recognition factor. It's easier to market a film when the audience is somewhat familiar with the story.

"They've also realized they can make these films in a tangibly different way than they did in the 1960s," he says. "Instead of epic filmmaking based around scale and large numbers of extras, it's now based around CG [computer-generated] effects. There are a lot of miracles in the Bible, so there's the opportunity to use CGI [computer-generated imagery] to generate huge crowds and the Red Sea parting and the Flood."

Entertain and Challenge

There's also the growth of the foreign market. Today the typical blockbuster makes two to three times as much overseas as it does in North America. This gives biblical stories, known all over the world, a special edge.

And because the most popular films worldwide tend to be action films, this also means the studios are ensuring that the newest Bible epics will have many of the action-oriented elements that have made other recent sword-and-sandal movies (e.g., Clash of the Titans, 300, and their sequels) fairly popular globally.

For example, Noah turns Tubal-Cain, a figure so minor he gets just one verse in the Bible, into the leader of an army that tries to capture the ark when the rains come. Exodus: Gods and Kings, meanwhile, will reportedly open with a battle scene between the Egyptian army and rebel Hittites. It's rumored to climax with a scene in which Moses does not merely walk with his fellow Hebrews across the Red Sea but leads a cavalry charge against Pharaoh's chariots.

But as filmmakers revise and improvise with the stories, sometimes straying far from the biblical text, they risk alienating a huge part of their target audience.

Noah, in particular, has been the focus of controversy ever since an early draft of the script leaked in 2012. Brian Godawa, a Christian screenwriter and novelist who has written his own books about Noah, wrote a critique of that script with the headline "Darren Aronofsky's Noah: Environmentalist Wacko" that went viral.

Earlier this year, Christians who saw the finished film said they appreciated parts of it, such as its serious take on sin, judgment, and forgiveness. But they voiced concerns about other parts, such as when Noah becomes so convinced that humanity deserves to die that he is prepared to kill his own grandchildren.

In late February, at the request of the National Religious Broadcasters, Paramount—which called the film "a close adaptation of the biblical story" when it was announced two years ago—agreed to add a disclaimer to the film's promotional materials. The disclaimer states that the film was "inspired by" the story of Noah and had taken "artistic license" with it.

Similar concerns could arise when Exodus: Gods and Kings comes out in December. Scott, an agnostic, has said the Moses of his film will undergo a crisis of faith. And according to The Hollywood Reporter, the film will contain "an unconventional depiction of God."

Speaking to French magazine Premiere, Scott suggested the appeal of the story might lie in Moses' rejection of Egyptian polytheism rather than in Moses' monotheism per se. "Moses rises against the thousands of Egyptian gods in the name of one god," he said. "This is a very modern idea."

But films that go too far in the other direction—by catering to the church-based market—have faced criticism, too.

Christian blogger Matthew Paul Turner wrote about Son of God for The Daily Beast. He said the "biggest mistake" made by producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey was that they consulted with dozens of church leaders and produced precisely the sort of Jesus that Christians want to see—rather than a Jesus who might "surprise" or challenge the faithful.

Barbara Nicolosi, who worked on the script about Mary with Benedict Fitzgerald, says Christian and non-Christian filmmakers alike can suffer from a lack of theological depth. Secular filmmakers "don't have any sense at all of reverence toward the source material," she says, while films like Son of God tend to be "banal" and have no "mystery."

She cites The Passion as a rare example of a film made by someone who had experience, a strong directorial vision, and a proper attitude toward the text.

"Biblical material needs to be handled differently," she says. "It's not fodder for the filmmaker's imagination. The filmmaker is fodder for the biblical story. When you pick up a comic book and use that as source material, that's fodder for your imagination as a filmmaker—it serves you. When you make a biblical movie, you serve it."

Son of God was a modest success, but it played to the same audience as other faith-based films such as Fireproof and Courageous. And with the Book of Acts–themed series A.D., in the works for nbc next year, the producers have turned their attention back to television, where Bible stories have always had a home.

The real test, from Hollywood's perspective, will be whether a wider audience embraces big-budget ventures like Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings. If both are hits, other projects may be ready to hop on the bandwagon, such as a movie about Pontius Pilate starring Brad Pitt, or a remake of Ben-Hur being written by John Ridley (the Oscar-winning writer of 12 Years a Slave).

Hazeldine holds out hope that one of his own Bible-themed projects might get a boost if the trend takes off. He says it can be tricky to make films that are both innovative and respectful of their core audiences, but he says it's a goal worth aiming for.

"There are dangers in being too slavishly faithful and not challenging the audience at all, because you're not going to make great cinema that way," he says. "But there are also dangers in dismissing what's important to them. Somewhere there's a happy medium where you entertain them and inspire them, but hopefully also challenge them as well."

Peter T. Chattaway is a regular CT film critic and blogger at Filmchat.

The post The Battle of the Bible Films appeared first on Christianity Today.

The biblical version of the story is fairly brief, so filmmakers who have tackled it in the past have tended to do so either as part of a larger treatment of the early chapters of Genesis, or by pairing it with a completely modern story. They have also tended to pad the story out with elements borrowed from other parts of the Bible.

Kelley Boone / Flickr

Filmmakers have turned to the Bible for source material since the earliest days of the silent era, back in the late 19th century. The films they made were usually quite short and often reflected the religious iconography that was popular at the time. Little emphasis was placed on turning the stories into theatrical dramas, per se, let alone on making things "realistic."

Towards the end of this period—just as Hollywood was making the transition from silent films to sound—Warner Brothers produced a film called Noah's Ark (1928).

Based on a script by Daryl F. Zanuck, and plagued by rumours that a few of the extras died while shooting the Flood sequences, it was one of the first American films directed by a Hungarian named Michael Curtiz, who would go on to become famous as the director of films like Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Elvis-starring King Creole.

Like a number of silent films—such as D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923)—Noah's Ark combined the biblical story with a story set in the modern world, to allow the Bible to comment on modern issues.

Set during World War I, and produced one year before the stock market crash that kicked off the Great Depression, Noah's Ark takes aim at the modern belief in military and economic might, and draws an explicit connection between the skyscrapers of our age and the Tower of Babel.

At one point the film tells us that the Flood "was a Deluge of Water drowning a World of Lust," while the war was "a Deluge of Blood drowning a World of Hate!" The film ends with a suggestion—poignant, in retrospect—that, just as the rainbow promised no more global floods, so too there would be no more wars like the one that had just been fought.

The story of Noah itself is enhanced with details that are borrowed liberally from the biblical stories of Moses and others. Noah, for example, has to walk up a mountain to receive his first message from God, and when he does, he witnesses a burning bush.

MilosStankovic / iStock

Several years later, the Noah story surfaced again in Green Pastures (1936), which told several Bible stories in a sort of African-American idiom, with an all-black cast acting out the stories while a preacher tells them to the kids in his church.

While some elements in this film reflect the stereotypes of their day, the film itself follows God—here called "De Lawd"—on an interesting journey from his wrath at the beginning of the Bible to the mercy that is ultimately expressed through Jesus and prophets like Hosea. Along the way, there is a sequence in which De Lawd asks a preacher named Noah to build an Ark.

Interestingly, while this film does not explicitly depict the drunkenness that took place after the Flood, as described in Genesis 9, it does allude to Noah's love of alcohol when Noah suggests he might need to bring some extra liquor aboard the Ark—for medicinal purposes, you understand, because of all the potential snakebites.

One of the most famous big-screen adaptations of the Noah story came a few decades later, in The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966).

Directed by John Huston—who also plays Noah and provides the voice of God, too—this film covers the first 22 chapters of Genesis, from Creation to Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, and the most striking thing about the Noah sequence is how utterly different it is in tone from the rest of the film.

While the stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Abraham and Lot are all treated fairly seriously, the Noah sequence plays like a comedy, as Noah's wife worries about cleaning the house before the Flood comes, or as Noah interacts with the animals. The fact that it is also the first sequence in the film to contain substantially new dialogue—all of it tailored to fit the King James dialogue of the earlier scenes—adds to the effect.

Huston's film was one of the last big-screen Bible epics ever made by a major studio. The biblical genre has been absent from theatres for the most part since then, but a steady stream of Bible-based productions have been made for television, and the story of Noah has come up there a few times, too.

One of the more notable examples is Genesis: The Creation and the Flood (1994), directed by Ermanno Olmi, an Italian best-known for The Tree of the Wooden Clogs. This film was the first installment in a 13-part series known as "The Bible Collection".

But unlike all the subsequent films in that series—which starred well-known actors and had scripts that were conventional in structure and format, sometimes to the point of being downright banal—Genesis plays more like an arthouse film, with a cast of unknowns and a structure that, in its English form at least, relies heavily on a single narrator (Paul Scofield).

Most of the film depicts people living in the wilderness, wearing ancient clothes and living in ancient tents. But in one key moment, the film's depiction of the sinners in Noah's day shifts to a documentary-like depiction of modern wars and environmental devastation, such as the oil wells that were left burning at the end of the first Gulf War.

The narrator also quotes passages such as Psalm 50 throughout the film to underscore how the theme of judgment—but also mercy towards the righteous—is not unique to the story of Noah but runs throughout the Bible.

At the completely opposite end of the artistic and theological spectrum, this was followed a few years later by the two-part Hallmark movie Noah's Ark (1999), which starred Jon Voight as the Ark builder and F. Murray Abraham as Lot. Yes, that Lot.

When this film begins, Noah is a native of the city of Sodom who barely escapes along with his family; the Flood comes several years later. Lot, meanwhile, is a friend of Noah's who also escapes the destruction of Sodom—but he shows up again much, much later, after the Flood has arrived, as a pirate who leads an assault on the Ark.

The original broadcast version of Noah's Ark ran about three hours without commercials; on DVD, it is just over two. And it pads things out with lots of nonsense, from post-modern one-liners ("Up the creek without a rudder") and Singin' in the Rain quotes to a scene in which God decides he might as well destroy Noah's family too, but then Noah starts to dance, which amuses God, so God lets him live after all.

TLC

In addition to films that depict the biblical story itself, there have also been a few that modernize the story by imagining what would happen if God asked someone to build an Ark today. The Disney TV-movie Noah (1998), starring Tony Danza, and the big-budget comedy Evan Almighty (2007), starring Steve Carell, are both examples of this.

Neither of those films takes a remotely serious approach to the story. Instead, both films play the story for laughs, and are far more concerned with dads learning to spend more time with their kids than they are with anything resembling themes of divine judgment. The floods in both films are very local, and in Evan Almighty it is caused not by God but by land developers who cut corners when building a new dam.

One interesting development lately has been the way some filmmakers have turned the story of Creation into a tradition that Noah passes on to his family while they are aboard the Ark. This has the effect of underscoring the relationship between the original sin and the sins for which Noah's contemporaries are punished, and also the role that the Flood played in essentially un-doing Creation.

The earliest example of this story device that I am aware of is in the Noah-themed episode of Testament: The Bible in Animation (1996), an excellent British-Russian series of Old Testament stories that was made by the same team that went on to make the equally excellent stop-motion life-of-Jesus film The Miracle Maker (2000).

This episode uses a conventional form of hand-drawn animation for the Noah sequences and a more elaborate style involving digitally-manipulated pictures for the Creation sequence—but when Adam and Eve sin, they are suddenly rendered in the more conventional hand-drawn format. This becomes an interesting way to suggest, artistically, what it might have been like for them to suddenly realize that they are naked.

Something similar happens in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. To explain to his children why God is punishing mankind, Noah tells the story of Creation and the Fall—and this time, we see Adam and Eve rendered as beings who glow with the light of their unfallenness (similar, perhaps, to how Moses glowed after he met with God on Sinai, or how Jesus glowed at his Transfiguration). It is only after Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit that humanity assumes its current, duller form.

The Creation sequence isn't the only nod to other parts of the Bible in Aronofsky's film. There is also a striking moment in which Tubal-Cain—a descendant of Cain mentioned very briefly in Genesis 4, who is depicted here as a sort of early warlord—rallies his troops by shouting, "Men united are invincible!" This clearly echoes what God says about the descendants of Noah who build the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. By alluding to the Babel story, the film acknowledges that, to the extent that God was merciful to Noah and his family, it was with the knowledge that humanity would continue to go on sinning.

In addition, Aronofsky borrows heavily from Jewish traditions that are not exactly part of the canonical Bible, but are sometimes alluded to in the Bible. One key background text for Aronofsky's film, because it gives the name "Watchers" to the fallen angels who share forbidden knowledge with the descendants of Adam and Eve, is the Book of Enoch, which is cited and even directly quoted in the epistles of Peter and Jude.

Aronofsky also alludes to modern issues as well. The film, which has a broadly environmental subtext, depicts the devastation of the planet as an inevitable consequence of the violence of humankind; but it also has a rapid-fire montage in which this violence, and the possibility that the human race will keep on sinning if it survives the Flood, is represented by soldiers in many different kinds of armour—including modern uniforms.

From its big-budget visual effects to its deadly-serious approach to this particular story, Aronofsky's Noah is a highly unusual entry in the Bible-movie genre. But in its creative use of traditions outside of Genesis 6-9, and in its application of the story to the social issues of our time, Aronofsky's film is not unlike the films that came before it.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Surrey, BC and blogs about film at Patheos. His earlier essays on Bible films for CT Movies include "Top Ten Jesus Movies" and "Mary Goes to the Movies."

The post The Genesis of ‘Noah’ appeared first on Christianity Today.

I can't promise you'll like Noah. Nor would I suggest that if you don't, it indicates that something is necessarily wrong with you.

But as I struggled to write about this film this week—in the wake of dozens of other excellent pieces from both mainstream and Christian sources—that's what it all came down to. So yes, if you're wondering: Noah is worth your time and your ticket price.

Reason 1: Noah is a good movie made by good filmmakers who pursue important questions and think of movies as art.

Paramount Pictures

Darren Aronofsky directed the film (read our interview with him and co-writer Ari Handel), and what ties Aronofsky's body of work together is a deep concern for and interest in the most basic building blocks of human-ness.

His films stylistically swing between the mind-bendingly surreal and the uncomfortably, grittily real, but this is at the core of each one. Requiem for a Dream looked at humans as the kinds of beings who are driven by a desire for fulfillment and the good life, no matter how delusional. The Wrestler and Black Swan both explored embodiment, and painfully, graphically exposed what happens when we objectify and abstract bodies (male and female) from their connection to the rest of the human. The Fountain grappled with death and life after death.

I generally like Aronofsky's films, but I was especially captured by the weird, moody, enigmatic Fountain, which starred Hugh Jackman as, by turns, some kind of ancient wanderer, a doctor, and a futuristic enlightened consciousness, all in three stories that spanned a millennium. Lots of people didn't like the movie, which I understand. But I thought it was fascinating in its expansive imagination and wrestling with questions about mortality and humanity (and reincarnation). I thought about it for months afterward.

Noah is another entry in this filmography. It asks big questions: Are humans worth saving? What is the place of justice and mercy in existence? How ought people relate to both powers greater than themselves and to the world in which they dwell?

Paramount Pictures

But what makes Noah work, even in its more messy bits, is that it usually avoids asking those questions pedantically. Instead, it embeds them in a story shared by the world's major religions (most ancient mythologies as well). And it retells the story with a startlingly fresh imagination, generally strong writing, and great acting talent—Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins.

(If all you're looking for is a brief review, you can skip down to the "Caveat Spectator" now. But I've got more to say.)

Reason 2: Noah is a solid adaptation.

Adaptations are Hollywood bread and butter, as we all know from endless arguments over whether the movie is "as good" as the book, or whether it messes it up, or whether it's possible to effectively even make a book into a movie, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Paramount Pictures

What impressed me most about this adaptation was that Aronofsky and Handel, as they explained in their interview with us, thought of their version of the story as midrash. My best understanding of the Jewish tradition of midrash is that it is filling in a story with details from your imagination—staying true to the source where it says something, while imagining what's between the lines.

Bible movies (with the possible exception of the Jesus film) have always been a form of midrash. The Bible often leaves out things that make for good storytelling, like dialogue and scene-setting sensory details, because that's not its genre. Even the gospels tell us that Jesus performed many more miracles than are recorded, because there simply isn't enough room in the books for everything.

I like to think that God made us with imaginations and is okay with this—even encourages it, so long as we don't mistake our imaginations for reality. And kids who grow up in church are inducted into this movie- and story-mediated type of midrash at an early age. (Two words: Veggie Tales. Five more: Adventures in Odyssey's "Imagination Station.")

Noah respects the human's imaginative capacity by thinking of itself as a story about how it could have happened. Where the text says something, Noah does that thing. But where it is silent, the filmmakers worked hard to examine tradition, other texts, and what they know of people to think about one way the story could have worked out. (Even the most controversial of their narrative choices—something I won't spoil for you—has echoes of other Bible stories in it; it's probably not what happened, but things like it happened later, so it's not inconsistent.)

Some will (and have) take issue with how Noah is portrayed: as a tortured soul, not exactly friendly and cuddly, though he certainly loves his family. On the other hand, as Mark Driscoll (a person with whom I have not always seen eye to eye) pointed out at The Resurgence, there is some debate over what the Scriptural designation of Noah as a "righteous man" actually means. And given the rocky track record of the Bible's patriarchs, and the spotty character development of Noah in the actual book of Genesis, it seems at minimum plausible that Noah was a complicated man, and as a sinful human, he certainly was one in need of redemption and forgiveness.

So Aronofsky and Handel aren't suggesting that all the things that appear in this film are what happened. You wouldn't get in a time machine and travel back and see it all work out just like this.

But this is tremendously effective for an adaptation—especially for those of us who have heard the story our entire lives and grew up singing about the Lord telling Noah to build an "arky, arky" in Sunday School. It does what good art should do: it forces us to "re-see" a story anew, to once again sit on the edge of our seats and wonder what will happen next. That's hard to do with such a familiar story, and this is done well, while still respecting and hewing to its source material, as well as it can.

Reason 3: Noah is visually and imaginatively compelling.

Reportedly, the good folks at Industrial Light & Magic (the special effects company founded by George Lucas) did some of their most complicated work on this film, and it shows. The ark is enormous. The animals are fantastical, but plausible. The rock giants (Handel and Aronofsky's rendering of fallen angels, one interpretation of the Bible's "Nephilim") are emotionally resonant in the manner of Peter Jackson's rendering of Tolkien's ents. The account of creation is pushed into hand-drawn animation, which fits its place in the narrative. And one moment in particular, when the camera pulls back to show Noah standing and watching the wickedness of humanity, took my breath away.

While I watched Noah (in, unfortunately, a small screening room—I'd say to see this on the biggest screen you can), I thought once again that this is the best argument for going to a theater. When a work of art is as lovingly crafted as this, with such keen attention to detail, it deserves the biggest screening you can see it on. Allow yourself to be immersed in the experience. It's worth it.

Reason 4: Noah re-enchants the ancient world in powerful ways that counteract some of the worst excesses of modernity.

I admit it: at first, I found myself raising an eyebrow and wondering how much I should have to suspend my disbelief at some of the things that happened in Noah. For instance: rocks that glow and, when hit, start fires. Giant lumbering fallen angels encased in rock. Plants that sprouted from the ground.

Then I remembered something very important: this is a depiction of an antediluvian world, a world that is both very young and different from the post-flood world. In this world, it has never rained. Snakes apparently had legs, only ten generations ago (see the account of the fall of man in Genesis). Men live for centuries and centuries, something that changed after the flood, according to the Bible. And miracles happen a lot, both before and after the flood.

So when things happen in the movie that seem "magical," I have to remind myself that I'm a modern American living in the twenty-first century, for whom "magic" means "sleight of hand" and "enchantment" is part of fairy tales, not reality.

It would not have been so in the past. And, frankly, as a modern who is also a Christian, I believe in some fairly "magical" stuff—such as the idea that baptism does something significant, or that there is some sense in which the Eucharist is a particular means of grace, or that speaking to an invisible being through prayer makes sense.

Noah took seriously a world in which people, regular human people who love and hurt and feel guilt and desire and envy, would have taken for granted that these things that seem outlandish to me were just part of the created order. I left Noah feeling a little more aware of creation's "magic."

Reason 5: You should actually see it for yourself.

There are some people who should not see Noah, but those people are mostly small, impressionable children who may be afflicted with nightmares after this film. The story of Noah and the flood is a story about—well, frankly, a sort of genocide. Men had become so wicked—had so perverted the goodness of Creation—that "every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time." The earth itself was "corrupt" and "full of violence," and God decides to "put an end" to mankind, saving only a few.

So with the exception of Noah and his family, everyone dies.

Remember this: everyone. All the people. On earth. And a lot of the animals, too.

The movie takes this at face value, and so we see the drowning, hear the screams. We feel the agony of some of the survivors as they wonder if they should, in fact, try to save some of these people—many of whom, let's not forget, had to have been women and children.

No, it's not played for some kind of gory effect. But the account, as it's given to us, is a tale of mass death, the likes of which the world has not seen since. It's one that we should feel uneasy about. If it doesn't disturb you, that may be worth considering. (To establish the wickedness of man, the film must show that wickedness; I've detailed that in the "Caveat Spectator" section below.)

But you should also see the movie for yourself, because this is a film that people are going to be talking about, and it's a movie I can't really explain fully in a review. There's been a lot of rumor-mongering about this film—a lot of people talking about it without seeing it, and some of what they've been saying is false hearsay.

Seeing the movie means you can talk about it and give your own informed opinion about it. Better yet, see it with some others, and spend time discussing it afterward. Don't outsource your opinion on this one.

Let Me Just Bust Two Myths

In my tooling around the Internet this week, I've noticed one persistent myth being perpetuated by people who, I presume, haven't yet seen the film. I'm not sure exactly where it started, but let me make this clear: it is false to say that this Noah adaptation "never names God."

In fact, the characters are constantly (and I do mean constantly) talking to, referring to, thinking about, or discussing God. But Aronofsky and Handel rightly intuited from the Scriptural account and tradition that, ten generations out from the creation, and before God reveals his personal name to man (which is not "God," incidentally), it would make sense for people to think of God largely as "the Creator."

The characters in Noah—all of them, including the bad guys—believe in God. This is not a world with atheists or agnostics. This is a world where people live a very, very long time, long enough to pass stories down to their children, and where the presence of the Creator is still felt very strongly.

And so, the characters—again, all of them, even the bad guys—talk of God as "the Creator." They listen to him (though he does not speak audibly in the film, a filmmaking choice that Aronofsky and Handel have explained as an attempt to keep from trivializing the voice of God by assigning a human voice, usually Morgan Freeman, to him). They sometimes rail against him, but they know he's there. And he is certainly named.

The other myth is that this is a work of "environmental propaganda" (or, as Glenn Beck apparently put it, that Noah is a drunk who is worried about climate change). Some (even here in CT) have suggested that this film portrays Noah as the worst stereotype of granola-eating tree-hugger who thinks man should be wiped out because he impacts the environment.

I disagree.

Yes, this film certainly depicts one of antediluvian man's greatest sins as wanton destruction of the earth. But there's not a lot of tree-hugging here (nor a lot of trees to hug). I have difficulty, as someone who leans right in my own politics, extracting a political agenda from this film.

Rather, there is what seems to me a good, balanced sense that the earth was given to man to both live in and care for. (Remember, man was not given explicit permission to eat animal flesh until after the flood, and even then with the stipulation that they should not eat blood, or the life of the flesh—a stipulation that carries into the New Covenant and seems to indicate this activity was going on before the flood.)

Instead of suggesting that the earth ought to be left alone, Noah tells his son early in the story that we only pick those plants that we're going to use, and we leave the others to grow. That seems like good creation care to me. And when God causes the earth to grow trees so Noah has something with which to build the ark, Noah and his family are happy to cut them down and make them into a boat—because they need the boat for survival.

Certainly the story, following tradition, goes on to explore whether or not humanity ought to have been wiped out completely, or whether God intended to preserve humans. This is a big question, one the movie refuses to answer definitively—nor does it need to.

But then again, man is preserved, and the movie depicts this as a good thing.

One More Point

Some are saying that you should go see the movie to "send a message to Hollywood" to make more carefully-crafted Bible-based movies. If that's something that motivates you to buy tickets, then go ahead and buy the ticket.

After all, after The Passion of the Christ did amazing business back in 2004, largely due to "faith-based" audiences (it still, by far, holds the record for the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, largely because it drew in a market segment that wouldn't typically flock to an R-rated film). And that is widely considered the point in film history, a decade ago, in which reaching the "faith audience" became important to the movie business again.

But I'm more than a little hesitant to suggest this as a reason. Here's why: when a movie is successful, the impulse is for the entire industry to jump on the bandwagon, often making successively more shoddy knock-offs of the original success, trying to replicate the magic and rake in more dollars.

It's clear that for Aronofsky and Handel, this film represents a passion project, a story they really wanted to tell. This is not a movie built to please audiences and rake in the dollars (though many audiences will be pleased). But history indicates that seeing a movie to "send a message" will likely wind up spawning dozens of poor and shoddy imitations. So the best reason to see the movie is to enjoy it, to think about it critically as a work of art, to learn about storytelling and re-envision a story that for many has become old, stale, and ridden with clichés.

Noah is not poorly made or shoddy. It is not political. It is not evangelistic. It is not a theological treatise.

Rather, it's a movie that approaches the level of "good art." It asks big questions. It explores concepts like grace, justice, pride, guilt, and love. It respects its source material and respects the power of human imagination. It takes a sober look at the evil in the human heart.

That is the sort of movie worth watching.

Caveat Spectator

As I said above, Noah is a disturbing tale in which nearly the entire population of the earth is wiped out in a cataclysmic flood. Additionally, following and expanding upon the narrative provided in Genesis, men and women are evil and engaged in evil acts. However, nearly every evil act is suggested rather than depicted, which leads to more of a feeling of evil than a picture of it (with the exception of a few brief moments in which animals are brutally torn apart while still alive, which is just gross and depressing).

Thematically, there's a few other things to note: several women run screaming, and not playfully, from pursuing men; one in particular is discovered and adults will understand that she has likely been physically abused. Noah himself, plagued by an overdeveloped sense of justice that has not yet been tempered by mercy, slowly becomes more angry and violent as the movie progresses—a reading that is not in the text, but could be suggested by it. In several places, particularly extrabiblical narratives, the death of children is contemplated. People die and are stabbed and fight.

The movie includes the story from Genesis (this is a spoiler if you haven't read Genesis) in which Noah gets drunk and lies naked in a cave, and must be covered by his sons. We see Noah drinking and know he is becoming intoxicated, and the actual shot of his nakedness is from a distance; we get a tiny, distant view of his nude backside.

Finally, the retelling of the Creation narrative does imply, in a manner not too unlike that in Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, that the days of creation, while clearly prompted and directed by a Creator, may have happened in a way that is not consistent with a literalist six-day creation understanding, which may upset some audiences. (However, the flood is depicted as a global flood, and the ark is built to the specifications given in Genesis, and the Noah narrative, on the whole, is taken quite literally.)

For Further Reading

I've read a lot about Noah in the last few weeks. Here's some of the best I've read:

• Gregory Alan Thornbury's article in The Gospel Coalition, a fine look at the theological successes and gaps in Noah. (Full disclosure: Dr. Thornbury is the president of The King's College, where I teach.)
• E. Stephen Burnett's article "When All You Have Is Evangelism, Every Movie Looks Like a Tool" in Christ & Pop Culture.
• Two articles by Steven Greydanus in National Catholic Register: a piece that closely examines theological tradition about Noah, and his excellent review.
• Peter Chattaway has written several pieces for us here at Christianity Today around Noah, including an interview with Aronofsky and Handel and a roundup of "Noah" movies throughout movie history. He's posted a lot more on his blog, all of which is worth reading and can be found here.
• One of our regular critics, Brett McCracken, reviews the film for Converge.
• Josh Larsen points out something important at ThinkChristian that I only hinted at here: Christians don't own the copyright on Noah.
• A.O. Scott wrote a fine review for The New York Times.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today's chief film critic. She is also an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City and editor of QIdeas.org. She tweets @alissamarie.

The post Noah appeared first on Christianity Today.

So when Scott was offered a chance to return to the franchise that he had inaugurated over three decades ago, he decided to put the “space jockey” front and center. But he wasn’t content to make another sequel: instead, he would make a prequel that explained, to some degree, the origin of the previous movies’ aliens. But he also wasn’t content to make another monster movie: he wanted to make a movie that would tackle some of the Big Questions, like where we come from and where we are going. (Not only that, but, just so there would be no confusion, he would put characters in the movie who explicitly told us that they were tackling the Big Questions.) Hence Prometheus begins with a giant musclebound albino standing near a waterfall on some primitive planet, drinking some black goo, and disintegrating into the rushing waters, whereupon the remains of his DNA recombine to form the building blocks of life as we know it.

Um, okay.

Much has been written about how Prometheus abandons the blue-collar naturalism of its predecessor (once famously described as a movie about “truckers in space”) in favor of a glossier high-tech world full of 3-D holograms, levitating probes and automated surgery machines. Much has also been written about the enormous plot holes and poorly written characters in Prometheus.[2] (The “truckers in space” showed a lot more common sense, and were more believable as people, than the supposedly top-tier space explorers here.) But one of the bigger problems with Prometheus—especially as it relates to Alien—is how it abandons the true mysteriousness of the original film in favor of something more prosaic and banal, even as it wears its philosophical ambitions more readily on its sleeve.

The original Alien started as a run-of-the-mill monster movie but quickly became more than that. The screenplay, originally titled “Star Beast,” was rechristened when the writers realized that the word “alien” can function as both a noun and an adjective; and with this ambiguity, they opened the possibility that the title might refer to something more than just extraterrestrial lifeforms. Scott elevated the material even further by giving the film moody atmospherics and an artsier style that emphasized the blurring of the lines between human, animal, and machine. The titular alien, designed by the Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger, goes through several phases that play on sexual anxieties in horrific, unexpected ways—such as the “facehugger,” a sort of scrotum with fingers that rapes its victim orally to plant the next phase inside him—and the various phases were built from components that ranged from sheep intestines and cow’s stomach lining to Rolls Royce cooling tubes and even, reportedly, an actual human skull. This blurring of lines is emphasized visually, as when the sole survivor, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), doesn’t even recognize the alien sitting right in front of her because its head resembles the tubes on the wall, and narratively, as when it is revealed that the science officer Ash (Ian Holm) is actually an android who was placed on the ship to further the secret agenda of the company that everyone works for.

One of the more striking techniques Ridley Scott used to blur these lines was his repeated close-ups of non-humans, indeed of mere things. Before any of the human characters have woken from their stasis, the film shows us a conversation between two of the ship’s computers—a conversation that is reflected in the visors of two helmets that happen to be sitting opposite the computer screens. Later, when the adult alien claims its first victim (not counting the poor guy whose body hosted the alien in the first place), Scott cuts to a close-up of the ship’s mascot, a cat, as it watches; the human victim screams, off-screen, in terror and pain, but the cat remains passive. Several scenes later, Ash is revealed to be an android when he gets into a fight with his shipmates and one of them literally knocks his head off his shoulders: the camera lingers on Ash’s dangling head as his body keeps twitching and lunging, and it lingers again when the android’s remains are set on fire and the skin peels back to reveal the blank, mannequin-like face mold beneath. And then, of course, there is the almost featureless face of the xenomorph itself: it has no eyes, nor any visible ears or nose, but it can sense its victims all the same. (In something of a twofer, there is even a brief shot in which the alien observes the cat.) By the time the film concludes with a close-up of Ripley sleeping in suspended animation again, the viewer is left to wonder if there is any more life or soul behind those lidded eyes than there was behind all the other bestial, mechanical faces that the camera lingered on.

And, as it happens, one of the most effective close-ups concerned the “space jockey” it-self—an entity that seemed to almost grow out of its ship, thus blurring the lines between organism and mechanism even more. As the human explorers step away from its remains, the camera zooms in past them to come in tighter on the creature, even though it is mostly hidden in shadow; Scott seems to be telling us that the key to the movie may be lurking somewhere in there.

If only he had left it at that. Instead, Prometheus shows little interest in what the “space jockey” represented, purporting instead to tell us what the “space jockey” actually was—which turns out to be a much less interesting question. When he peers behind the mask—for, yes, it turns out now that the humans in the first film were looking at a spacesuit, and not an exoskeleton—Scott reveals that the “space jockey” was actually an alien that looked a lot like us, just taller, more muscular, notably lacking in pigmentation, and bald. So where the previous film blurred lines in a provocative way, the new film restores them; and the “space jockey” that once seemed so, well, alien to us is now much less so.

Once again, Scott tries to elevate the material, to make the new film more than just another sci-fi movie, but this time he does it less through aesthetic choices and more through speculation about the origins and destiny of human life. The story proper begins at the far end of this century, as a couple of archaeologists discover evidence in Scotland that aliens visited this world at least 35,000 years ago and left behind a star map pointing to one of their worlds. The archaeologists immediately assume that these aliens were no mere visitors to our planet but the actual creators of humankind, and they persuade one of the world’s richest men to finance an expedition to that world, ostensibly to see if they can meet our makers and get answers to life’s Big Questions.

What they find, however, is a lot more humdrum: lots of dead “space jockeys” and a stash of black goo that, upon coming into contact with human and animal bodies, quickly takes over those bodies and turns them into monsters of one sort or another. And unlike the xenomorphs of the Alien films, who at least had a plausible life cycle, the monsters of Prometheus seem random and arbitrary. So, too, are a number of the plot twists, such as an android’s decision to infect one of the team leaders with the alien black goo because, well, why not? Indeed, arbitrariness becomes almost a virtue unto itself: twice, characters say that they believe in God, or in the alien origins of life on Earth, because “It’s what I choose to believe,” as though the choice didn’t need to be based on anything.

By the end, the film has pretty much abandoned the truly Big Questions, and all we are left with are considerably smaller ones, such as where the “space jockeys” came from, and why they seem to have tried to wipe out the human race 2,000 years ago.[3] These sorts of unresolved plot points might draw some viewers into the sequel, should it ever be made. But they hardly compare to the deep, disquieting vision that hit viewers on such a visceral level back when the first film came out.

1. A number of fans, including myself, think the first sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), was at least the equal of Alien and might even be an improvement on it in some ways.

2. Why did the “engineers” leave star maps on Earth, many years ago, pointing to the planet with their weapons lab and not, say, their actual home planet? Why did the Weyland corporation hire such mutually antagonistic people for this mission? Why do the scientists make so many scientifically unsound decisions, like taking their helmets off within minutes of arriving in a foreign environment? (Have they never heard of the viral havoc that was wreaked when Europeans first arrived in the Americas?) And so on, and so on.

3. Believe it or not, Ridley Scott has actually suggested that the “space jockeys” may have decided to wipe us out because the Romans killed Jesus, who was apparently an emissary of theirs:movies.com/movie-news?/ridley-scott-prometheus-interview/8232

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Vancouver, British Columbia and writes about movies. He blogs at patheos.com/blogs/filmchat/

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Movie star Jane Russell, who died Monday at the age of 89, may go down in Hollywood history as a sultry sex symbol, but what’s less known about her is that she was a pro-life Christian and adoptionadvocate.

Peter T. Chattaway did a nice interview with Russell for us two years ago. In that conversation, Russell said she came to Jesus as a young girl, was taught Scripture by her mother (and later in Hollywood by Henrietta Mears), had an abortion as a young woman that almost killed her, and then later became an adoption advocate, adopting three kids of her own. As for her image as a sex symbol, she says she naive about the whole thing, only to later learn that “all it was about was some cleavage!” She also had some advice for young Christians looking for Hollywood work today: “You don’t have to break the Lord’s rules.”

The post ‘You Don’t Have to Break the Lord’s Rules’ appeared first on Christianity Today.

No, no, this has nothing to do with the child of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. It’s just another recycled big screen horror flick. Horror movies are so hot right now, Hollywood just can’t stop cranking out remakes along with the originals. And, sure enough, just in time for its 30-year anniversary, here’s a whole new version of The Omen, starring Mia Farrow, Julia Stiles, Pete Postlethwaite, and Liev Schreiber.

The “son of Satan” plotline has opened the door for 20th Century Fox to vigorously market this new Omen to Christian audiences, just as Sony did with The Da Vinci Code. This week, I received a pamphlet in the mail that was filled with Bible verses that relate, in some way, to The Omen. And this “tract” also pointed out that the movie opens on 06.06.06. I was not spooked.

Neither are many of the Christian press critics who have seen the film.

Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies) gives it only two stars, even though he finds it to be “extremely faithful to the original. … Director John Moore, whose last film (Flight of the Phoenix) was also a remake, does not stray far from his source, though he does make a few slight changes.”

Is it all just thrills and chills? Or does it actually mean something? Chattaway says it “taps into every parent’s fear that the babies they dote on will grow up to become children who don’t like them; it works because it presents a worst-case scenario of what can happen when children get older and develop their own separate identities, including friendships and interior lives that are not what their parents would wish for them.”

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says it’s “skillfully crafted and well-acted,” and that it differs from The Da Vinci Code in that it “does not attack core Christian beliefs, though its horror-film treatment of religion is obviously sensationalized.” Overall, he finds it “a fairly decent, if occasionally lurid, thriller.”

“It’s still creepy after all these years,” writes Steve Beard (Thunderstruck), who offers excerpts from interviews with the cast and director. “While some will speak with condescending tones about the superiority of the original version with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, the performances of Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, Mia Farrow, and David Thewlis were engaging and spooky. While the very premise of the film … will strike some as heretical or preposterous, it will definitely make for interesting conversation about the end of the world as we know it.”

Most mainstream critics are calling this one a bad Omen.

Don’t make a date with The Break-Up

Instead of talking about whether or not they can play a part in saving the world, most moviegoers spent the weekend talking about Jennifer Aniston and her tabloid-headline romance with Vince Vaughn. The two actors star together in The Break-Up, currently No. 1 at the box office.

Critics, meanwhile, are wishing the movie would just go away.

Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies) says it’s “a romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor particularly funny. To some degree, this is intentional, since the story concerns the end of a relationship rather than the beginning of one; indeed, the filmmakers have called it an ‘anti-romantic comedy.’ But even given that premise, this movie represents one huge wasted opportunity.”

He says the script “doesn’t create characters so much as it falls back on stereotypes: men are pigs who would rather drink beer and play video games all day than do anything romantic, while women play passive-aggressive head games and try to change the men in their lives—and representatives of both genders … agree that the best thing to do after you have broken up with someone is to have sex with some really hot stranger, just to annoy your ex-partner.”

Harry Forbes (Catholic News Service) calls it a “tepid but only fitfully affable romantic comedy.” He says, “Underneath the not-often-funny funny business, there are some universal truths about relationships, but the setup never quite rings true …. Overall, the script … could have been sharper, though to their credit, the film avoids a cliché d denouement.”

Christa Banister (Crosswalk) says, “Sadly, The Break-Up is yet another instance where the movie’s trailer promised far more than the finished product could deliver. … Basically, when it’s all said and done [the movie] is nothing more than a really long sitcom with poorly conceived characters that most people couldn’t care less about—[let] alone identify with. And in a summer filled with a plethora of attention-grabbing action movies, this isn’t the welcome, feel-good date movie diversion that most audiences would hope for.”

Christopher Lyon (Plugged In) says, “The spatting in The Break-Up settles for re-creating pedestrian domestic squabbling instead of making it outrageous enough to laugh at or making it revealing enough to move us. All we’re left with is sitting on the sidelines with the couple’s friends thinking, ‘These people need to grow up already.'”

Mainstream critics are trying to break up the relationship between moviegoers and this film.

Gore Galore: A Must-See Movie?

Is it a disaster movie? Or is the movie a disaster? Technically, An Inconvenient Truth is neither.

What is it, then? It’s a documentary about signs of pending disaster for our planet, due to the effects of global warming. And it stands out as a memorable big screen experience for several reasons:

• It brings the threat of global warming to vivid life, so we can see what may happen, and what is already happening, to the world—damage that we have the power to prevent.
• It’s hosted by Al Gore.
• It’s the first time moviegoers have paid to fill a cinema for what amounts to a fancy PowerPoint presentation.

An Inconvenient Truth may be the year’s most important must-see. Audiences lined up to watch heroes try to survive the sinking of the Poseidon. How many will buy tickets to learn how we can prevent natural disasters?

It’s likely that many who read this are not fans of Gore’s politics or personality—and recent reader feedback at Christianity Today Movies would indicate as much. That’s fair. But pay close attention to the responses of those who have seen this movie, especially those who wouldn’t identify themselves as liberals or democrats. They’re finding value in the Truth as well. In fact, many evangelicals are standing with Gore on this issue.

In a commentary for Christianity Today Movies, David Neff takes issue with some of Gore’s scientific arguments. But he writes that the movie is “an effective introduction to the subject of climate change.” He adds that it “engages its audience with its moral seriousness and its avuncular and folksy style.” And he concludes that Gore “wants action now—and he’s right about that.”

Mainstream critics are going so far as to become advocates for the film. “In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review,” wrote Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), “but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.” David Denby (The New Yorker) says, “It will be interesting to watch how skeptics will deal with Gore’s bad news on the environment without making themselves look very small.”

Tired of reading about it? Try listening: Here’s an NPR report, in which Bob Mondello, NPR film critic, Richard Harris, NPR science correspondent, and reporter Michelle Norris discuss the film’s artistic and scientific value.

Stay tuned to Film Forum for further reviews in the upcoming weeks.

More reviews of recent releases

Duma: After a particularly taxing day last week, my wife Anne and I relaxed with a DVD of a movie we had missed during its theatrical run—Duma. What caught our attention was the name of the director. Carroll Ballard directed the masterful adaptation of The Black Stallion (1979), Never Cry Wolf (1983), and Fly Away Home (1996). Could this mean that Ballard had surprised us with yet another wonderful film about the grace and beauty of the animal kingdom?

The answer is, unequivocally, yes.

Duma takes you from a family home in South Africa to an ambitious journey through the wilderness in the company of a beautiful cheetah. Young Xan (Alex Michaeletos) is reluctant to let go of the wild cat he has raised since he found him orphaned and alone, in spite of the wise counsel of his parents (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis). And when Xan suffers a painful loss of his own, the experience forms a powerful bond between him and his furry friend.

But we all know that a cheetah isn’t going to do well as a domestic pet. What will it take for Xan to heal from his wounds and make the right decision? A memorable adventure, apparently. Xan and Duma must survive a challenging trek across the desert in the company of a suspicious traveler (Eamonn Walker) who has an animal friend of his own—a mischievous kangaroo rat.

We were delighted by this film, largely for the beauty of its wild African backdrop, the majesty of that graceful cheetah, and the cast’s understated performances. It may not be the most original story of its kind, but it boasts the kind of aesthetic pleasures that are hard to find in moviegoing today. Moreover, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better family film released in the last year.

Other Christian film critics are also discovering this delightful film. Mary Lasse reviewed the film for Christianity Today Movies almost a year ago, during its limited theater run: “Duma is one of Hollywood’s better attempts at live-action family-friendly fare. … [It] is chock full of themes: the joys of childhood, the pains of growth, the importance of friends and family, reconciliation in relationships, the wildness of animals and humans—you name it, this film’s got it.”

Andrew Coffin (World) writes, “[Ballard’s] African landscapes are luxurious and mesmerizing, and his action scenes spirited. More importantly, Mr. Ballard knows how to work with both children and animals, so that the former are stretched by their circumstances without growing too old in the process, and the latter become genuine friends without excessive anthropomorphization.”

And Annabelle Robertson (Crosswalk) says, “Ballard shows great sensitivity and doesn’t back away from tough issues, like the complex themes of home, loss and death.He coaxes excellent performances from [his] actors, and doesn’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing the cheetah, as so many directors would.Any emotions he shows are real, and stem from the characters—not some projected sentiment we think the animal might be feeling.”

And she concludes, “Overall, an outstanding film that not only deserves a place in every family library, but is also destined to become a classic.”

Over the Hedge: Andrew Coffin (World) says the movie “doesn’t begin to reach Pixar-level transcendence (in the age-defying use of the term), this DreamWorks effort holds up well as amiable entertainment. One might not be tempted to recommend Over the Hedge to adults without children, but the cartoon is fun, energetic, and, mostly, family-appropriate.”

The Lost City: Andrew Coffin (World) says, “[A]lthough there may be some legitimate artistic gripes with the film, this 16-years-in-the-making project all but oozes with conviction—a trademark Hollywood would love, were the film not so thoroughly, magnificently politically incorrect.”

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