Darren Aronofsky's Noah – a line-by-line commentary

Introducing a detailed look at one of the biggest Bible epics of the past half-century.

Mar 28, 2023

Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

This week marks the ninth anniversary of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

The film—by far the most successful Bible movie produced by any Hollywood studio since the 1960s—is a fascinating study in contradictions.

It’s a big-budget Bible epic written and directed by an indie filmmaker known for his dark, low-budget stories of self-destructive obsession.
It was promoted quite heavily to Christian audiences, but it was praised by some critics as the most Jewish Bible epic ever made.
It embraces scientific theories about the evolution of life on this planet, but it follows creationist principles insofar as it depicts both humans and animals as originally vegetarian.
And, like its Ark-building protagonist, it is deeply ambivalent about the place of human beings within the created order: are we sinners who deserve to die, or are we precious gifts that need to be saved?

I’ve written about this film a lot over the years. I was tracking its development at my blog as far back as 2006, when Aronofsky first revealed that he was working on a “biblical epic”; one year later, he revealed that the epic in question was going to be about Noah, and I was very intrigued when he said it would focus on Noah’s “survivor’s guilt”. But Aronofsky was still working primarily on low-budget indies at that time. It wasn’t until Black Swan conquered the box office in 2010 and won an Oscar for its lead actress that Aronofsky—who got an Oscar nomination of his own for directing that film—was in a position to pursue his big-budget dream.

Aronofsky started filming Noah in 2012, and the movie very quickly became a topic of controversy. In November of that year, a Christian writer who got an early draft of the script wrote a review of it and claimed that the film had turned Noah into an “environmentalist wacko”—an accusation that dogged the film until it opened to the public in 2014, at which point a new controversy emerged, to the effect that the film was a “Gnostic” parable that attacked belief in God. I covered these controversies as they unfolded—I, too, got a copy of that early script, and I could tell that its critics were ignoring some of its more promising elements—and I followed every twist and turn of the film’s release up to and beyond its arrival on home video.

It would be hard to overstate how intensely this film combined some of my favorite interests. I am a lifelong Bible geek who once memorized the list of descendants from Adam to Noah and beyond, just for fun. (I was delighted when the first line of dialogue in Noah began with this list, and I made a point of reciting it for Aronofsky when I spoke to him right after watching the film.) One of my biggest research projects for one of my favorite university classes was all about the Nephilim and the other giants in the Bible. One of my favorite phone interviews from the earliest days of my career as a journalist was with Aronofsky when he released his first film, Pi, in 1998. (I recently posted the audio of that interview here.)

And, as a lifelong subscriber to Biblical Archaeology and Bible Review who caught a bus half-way across Vancouver when I was in my teens just so I could go to a Jewish bookstore and buy a commentary on the book of Kings—because I was thinking of writing a novel about Elijah, Elisha, and the Omrid dynasty, and I really wanted to know what Jewish interpreters had to say about all that—I loved how Aronofsky’s film opened my eyes to many Jewish traditions about Noah and the early chapters of Genesis that I had never encountered before.

Some Christians watched the film and took immediate offense at whatever they didn’t understand. Me, I tried to learn from the things that seemed strange and unfamiliar, and it became very clear, very quickly, that the biggest controversies around this film boiled down to the fact that a lot of Christian viewers simply weren’t familiar with the Jewish traditions that had informed the film. (Heck, in some cases, Christians objected to elements in the film that were long-established parts of other Christian traditions, like the way Adam and Eve glowed in the Garden of Eden.)

After Noah came out on DVD, I figured there was so much to say about the film that I would go through it line-by-line, looking at how the film was developed and how it commented on various religious, scientific, and political issues. I was inspired, in this, partly by my friend Steven D. Greydanus’s comment in his own review that he didn’t want to write a review of the film, he wanted to write a commentary. I was also inspired by a distant memory of reading Isaac Asimov’s In the Beginning—a line-by-line annotation of the early chapters of Genesis—back when I was a teenager.

I got very close to completing the commentary, and then I set it aside as other things consumed my time. (Among other things, I spent a week in Morocco in the fall of 2014, visiting the set of Killing Jesus, and I spent much of the next several months writing about that film and A.D. The Bible Continues and lots of other things.) But I have never entirely forgotten the Noah project, and, with the film’s tenth anniversary coming up next year, I have thought about putting it out as an e-book.

In the meantime, I figured I’d publish it here at Substack in serialized form—and in multimedia form, with images from relevant sources, video clips when those are available through official channels, and Spotify links when discussing the music. There are 22 chapters on the DVD (one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, perhaps?), so there are 22 chapters in my commentary, and the plan right now is to post a new chapter every Tuesday, give or take, between now and late August. The first chapter is free to all, but future chapters will be for paid subscribers only.

For those who do read the chapters, please feel free to comment and let me know if I’ve overlooked anything. I learned a lot from the people who commented on my blog posts way back when, and I’m sure there’s more where that came from.

A quick note about format

Each chapter of my commentary goes through all of the dialogue from the equivalent DVD chapter, pausing every now and then to add comments that fall into one or more of the following categories:

Sources. The biblical, apocryphal, and other sources for the scene in question.
Tradition. How the scene reflects traditional Jewish beliefs and practices.
Development. How the script changed from early draft to final film.
Themes. How the scene in question fleshes out the movie’s themes.
Images. How the film uses and sometimes repeats visual elements.
Movies. Fun little connections between Noah and other movies.
Science. How the film follows—or doesn’t—modern scientific theories.
Controversy. How the scene in question stirred up controversy.
Comment. Occasional thoughts that don’t quite fit the other categories.
Music. What the equivalent track on the soundtrack album is called, and why.

Feel free to read the commentary however you like: You can read all the comments in sequential order, following the movie’s storyline, or you can search each page for mentions of a specific category and leap from one comment in that category to the next (if, say, you’re only interested in the Science or the Sources, etc., etc.).

A quick note about sources

This commentary will link to any online sources that are quoted here, but there are certain key offline sources that will come up frequently, too. These include the books, videos, and other documents that were created by the studio and the filmmakers, all of which shed light on how the movie evolved over the years of its development.

The list of sources made by the studio and the filmmakers includes:

Noah (dir. Darren Aronofsky). Paramount Home Video. 2014. Most editions of the Blu-Ray disc have three behind-the-scenes featurettes; the exclusive Target edition has seven.
Noah: A Film by Darren Aronofsky. Rizzoli. 2014. Includes photos by Niko Tavernise and a complete copy of the script (referred to in this commentary as the “published screenplay”) by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel.
Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel & Niko Henrichon. Noah. Image Comics. 2014. Portions of this graphic novel were published a few years earlier in Europe, long before the movie itself was made.
Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel. Noah. Undated early screenplay. This early version of the screenplay—which appears to have been the basis for the graphic novel—was reviewed a year or two prior to the film’s release by a handful of movie bloggers (including myself).
Noah production notes. Paramount. 2014.
Mark Morris. Noah: The Official Movie Novelization. Titan Books. 2014.
Susan Korman. Noah: Ila’s Story. Titan Books. 2014.
Clint Mansell. Noah: Music from the Motion Picture. Nonesuch. 2014.

This commentary will also make occasional references to Aronofsky’s earlier films, including Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), and Black Swan (2010). All of these films have images, cast members, and thematic concerns that are reflected in Noah on some level. I have not yet revised this commentary to take mother! (2017) and The Whale (2022) into account.

Noah commentary chapters:
Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

Movie scene guides:
Risen | The Young Messiah | Paul, Apostle of Christ | Mary Magdalene

Thoughts and Spoilers

Discussion about this post