The Australian Catholic Film Office says movie company Paramount Pictures has taken a big risk with its production of the Biblical epic, Noah.
The film, which hits the nation’s screens on March 27, stars Russell Crowe as Noah and Emma Watson as his adopted daughter, and cost Paramount about $130 million to make.
Fr Peter Malone MSC from the Australian Catholic Film Office told The Record that since the highly successful 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, film companies have shown an increased willingness to produce Bible-based films.
“[The Passion of the Christ] opened up, especially in the United States, an appetite for more explicit religious films, and that’s happened over the last 10 years,” he said.
“This is just a big-budget variation on that theme with the hope that people will go and see it.”
But matching the success of Mel Gibson’s film will be a difficult task.
“There’s not so much interest, at least in the Western world, in Old Testament stories,” Fr Malone said.
“I hope I’m wrong and that there is an interest, but I’d say it’s a big risk for the company to be spending $130 million on a Noah film.”
The film has already generated widespread discussion on how closely it aligns with the Bible’s account of the flood in Genesis, and Fr Malone said audiences should be prepared for an “imaginative rendering” of the story.
“Some of the Jesus films in recent decades have been able to combine offering some kind of an understanding of the background, and something of the themes, while telling the story, so I’m hoping Noah’s a bit like that,” he said.
Noah is one of several Bible-based films to be released in the next few years, with Exodus (December 12), starring Christian Bale, and Pontius Pilate (2015), starring Brad Pitt, among the others.
Fr Malone said although such films are based on events in the Bible, there was no guarantee that they would have a positive effect on audiences.
“I think people who have what’s generally called a simple faith, enjoy this kind of film, and it probably re-enforces their thinking about God’s intervention,” he said.
“But for people who don’t have any Christian faith, it’s hit or miss.”
The NSW-based Missionary of the Sacred Heart said the way a film dramatises human values is vital in determining what makes a good film.
“That’s a key, whether it’s an explicitly religious film or an implicitly religious film, so that you don’t come out just thinking ‘Wow, that was a great action epic’. It has to be more than that,” Fr Malone said.
“My hope for Noah is that it tells the story, that it enables us to go back to that period and understand some of the religious experience of the times, relate it to our religious experience, and trust the narrative rather than doing any heavy preaching.”