In Review: Noah

An over-the-top, big budget environmental allegory for our age

Why has Paramount Pictures produced a $135 million, 138-minute blockbuster starring two Oscar winners based on the Biblical fable of Noah at this time?

Cinema can be considered merely escapist mass entertainment. Or, like the Bible itself, film can be viewed as a storytelling vessel containing coded messages – motion picture parables to be deciphered. Movies are emanations of the collective psyche that both reflect and affect reality, even as they do so in a dreamlike medium in which imagery unfolds in the dark.