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Noah's Ark (TV Miniseries) | Ararat

Noah's Ark (TV Miniseries)

Amazon. Noah's Ark , a 1999 two-part miniseries, starring Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen, F. Murray Abraham and others. The Amazon reviews are almost uniformly critical (and uniformly fundamentalist in outlook).

IMDb: Noah's Ark. Cast and crew. The reviews and discussion are almost uniformly critical, but not always on biblical grounds.

"Slow Boat To Ararat" by Philip Michaels, www.teevee.org (May 6, 1999). Very funny negative review, but sympathetic to the writer's plight:

"Noah's tale takes up only two pages and change in my copy of the NIV translation of the Bible, most of it made up with action-packed passages like, 'The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Make a foot for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.'

Try stretching corkers like that into two nights of sweeps programming. You'll be tricking up scenes where pirates attack the ship, too."

Interview with Voight, AskMoses.com.

Christian Week: "Noah's Ark latest subject in disaster genre" by Peter T. Chattaway. Chattaway rises above the internet to deliver a thumbs-down on aesthetic and theological grounds that nevertheless avoids both long strings of capital letters and dire intimations that everyone involved in the production is on a fast boat to Hell. I've never seen the film, so I enjoyed hearing about this sequence:

"Eventually, in the film's most bizarre sequence, the ark's residents begin to go mad with boredom. What's more, Noah decrees that there is to be no procreation aboard the ark, and hence no sex. Tensions mount. People hallucinate. And then God tells Noah that he's reconsidered his plans and,well, all humanity is going to have to die after all. Noah, faced with imminent death, responds the only way he knows how–by whistling and dancing. God, amused, decides to keep humans around a while longer."

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops film critic weighs in:

Fanciful yet often thoughtful treatment … takes a lot of poetic licence in juggling the biblical account for dramatic effect, yet most believers will find the result neither irreverent nor irrelevant to an understanding of Noah as the new Adam.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "This 'Noah's Ark' sinks before docking" by Rob Owen (5/4/99) Did Pauline Kael ever threaten moviemakers with damnation?

"[T]hank whatever deity you worship that you weren't involved in the making of this monstrosity. Chances are the filmmakers already have a boarding pass to the afterlife — 'Going down!' — and you won't want to follow in their wake."

New York Magazine: "Zingin' in the Rain" review by John Leonard (May 3, 1999). Negative.

NeedCoffee.com Verdict? "Hand it over to Torquemada."

Christian Science Monitor: "A man, an ark, and a whole lot of critters" by M. S. Mason (April 30, 1999). My word, a positive review! (Mason like the humor.)

"TV Scoffers continue", review by Let Us Reason Ministries. Thumbs down, way down.

TV-special mish-mash incldues picture links, promotional info, reviews, and reams of random info on Noah, creation and suchnot, from The Revolution Against Evolution.

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