The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I *did* hear criticisms of it from some clergy (especially Catholic) that it was exploitive. The one that stuck in my head was that the film lingered in such detail on Jesus's sufferings, in a really excessive manner, and didn't balance it out with a discussion of theology.

It was certainly gory. I've never seen it, because I know that level of violence is something I can't tolerate. It just seemed gratuitous. Like Gibson was really relishing all the blood and guts and guilt aspects of it.

Essentially, the original Noah story doesn't really contain any information to help an ordinary person live their life and this movie does. Really, I think that should be the standard by which myths are judged.

I will admit that I haven't thought this through completely, and there might be some holes in my standard, but I'll take a shot at this myth.

Thanks! I'm going to keep your standard consciously in mind. I think I had something similar in operation ("Is there Truth to be found in this myth?"), but it's always good to hear someone else's take.

You know who'd make an awesome casting choice for Moses? A Jewish person. =P

I think maybe you mean Noah in that sentence because Moses is pretty well defined in terms of who "his people" are, and those people are the Jews. That's the whole point of the story.

Has anybody else seen the new Darren Aronofsky movie NOAH yet, starring Russell Crowe?

I'm putting this here rather than under "Music, Television, and Film" because it's the Judeo-Christian myth aspect of the movie--or lack thereof--that I find most fascinating. This is a completely different myth, keeping only the barest bones of the original and re-interpreting it into an enviro-vegan manifesto.

No wonder the right-wing Christians are up in arms!

But do they have cause to be? Is it fundamentally wrong to take someone's sacred story and change it beyond recognition to create a new one? Or does it depend on the circumstances? We neopagans of various stripes have seen wonky movies of our sacred stuff, from THE CRAFT to the THOR movies, and for the most part we shrug them off as entertainments irrelevant to our religions. Should Christians and Jews do the same here? Are some of them so irate simply because they're unaccustomed to seeing *their* myths transmogrified into something new?

As its own myth, I found NOAH somewhat interesting. But since they decided to call it NOAH, did the filmmakers have an obligation to stay true to the original?

 Like for example, how would a pagan in Greece see Jesus back in that time period.