Tuesday 2 August 2005

Pic of the day: The book was better.

Genesis movie review

I bought this DVD cheaply from a Christian bookstore. I had never heard about it before. These three things should have served as fair warning, but... It takes a lot for me to hear about a movie. And perhaps the Christian bookstore sold it so cheaply because they wanted to spread the Good News. Well, that might have happened too. But in this case, it was simply low budget.

The movie covers the part from creation till the end of the Deluge, which is a pretty small part even of Genesis. And in there it skips some of the more interesting stuff, and pads a little with stuff that isn't in the book. Mostly it pads with nature pictures, though, and movies of Bedouin herders, or some equivalent Marrocans. This also comes in handy in that whenever something happens that requires special effects, they just have this old patriarch tell about it instead. Definitely low budget.

There were no angels to be seen, and the antediluvian society was generic Bronze Age. Come on! These were people who lived for around 900 years unless killed by violence or accident. And they had the "sons of God" living among them to some degree. Surely their world must have been far more advanced than that. Even after the flood, when the remnant of humanity started to build the Tower of Babel, God said about them: "Nothing they decide to do will be impossible to them" as long as they had one common language. And by then the lifespan was already dwindling fast toward the new limit of 120 years which God decided before the Flood.

***

Hopefully some day someone with a grander vision will make a movie about Genesis, after also reading the Book of Enoch (which, while officially apocryphal, is actually quoted in the New Testament like any other Scripture). So what if it is myth rather than historical truth, or at most some mixture of the two? That's for God to worry about. That is no reason to make it prosaic. It is a good story, and it deserves a lot better treatment than this. Not recommended.

To identify the movie (there must surely be more than one about this topic) it is directed by Ermanno Olmi. At least it is family friendly, so don't worry about accepting it if someone tries to give it away. Which is quite likely, since it is boring.