Is it myth?  Is it history?  Is it epic?  Is it prophecy?

It’s all of the above, and then some!  These are the generations of Titanic, which begat Lord of the Rings, which begat Harry Potter, which begat Gladiator, which begat Noah.

The movie gets some things right.  As sacred history, it sets the story in the biblical account of creation in the beginning, and presents Earth as a garden which human beings were created to care for.  As prophecy, it foretells the destruction of the garden by these same human beings, whose greed is boundless.  The Earth is corrupt and filled with violence.

Prophecy calls people to face blunt realities of which they are in denial, and the film begins by presenting the Flood as the coming ecological consequence of human actions.  But the focus shifts from human instrumentality to divine punishment; the Creator becomes the destroyer, and Noah is his cruel henchman.

The biblical use of symbolic numbers always causes a problem for a contemporary culture  based on exact measurement, and so, what to do with all those descendants of Adam who lived such seemingly lengthy lives?  History and myth get even more confused when Methusalah, Tubal-Cain, and the Nephilim are all stirred into the cinematic melting pot.

The desolate garden is reconstituted from a single seed preserved by Methuselah, to provide forests of gopher wood for the building of the ark, and, since this task is apparently beyond the power of the six-hundred-year-old Noah and his three sons, the Nephilim– literally creatures of stone from a mythical stone age–do the job for him.

There seem to be no limits on the numbers of animals allowed into the arc (not just two of every sort; nor two of every unclean animal and seven pairs of all clean creatures).  But when all those other nasty fellows out there, under the leadership of Tubal-Cain, come crashing to the gangway, they are refused admittance. 

Tubal-Cain (“a man of might in the days when earth was young; by the fierce red light of his furnace bright the strokes of his hammer rung”) is the forger of instruments of bronze and iron–of tools and weapons–and his followers are armed to the teeth.  The ensuing mayhem is not a pretty sight, and the violence, wrought on behalf of the Creator by the Nephilim, seems to outdo everything which brought on the punishment in the first place.

There is love interest, as always, to complicate the plot still further, but all ends well as the ark finally runs aground in Iceland, where exciting nordic sagas await them in a bleak and barren landscape.