Noah divides

Opinion is divided on Aronofsky's Noah. What's somewhat striking is that this doesn't always fall along predictable lines. Ken Ham panned the film. Yet, to judge by reviews (I haven't seen it), the film checks all the right boxes for a young-earth-creationist flood. It has a global deluge. It has antediluvian herbivory. It has the special creation of Adam and Eve. And it has a strict YEC-chronology. Just 10 generations between Adam and Noah, which makes Methuselah the living grandfather of Noah. So it's ironic that Ham dislikes it so much. 

Of course, Aronofsky is co-opting antediluvian herbivory as a pretext to propagandize his vegan ideology. So I understand why creationists like Ham resent the political opportunism. Still, the essentials are surprisingly faithful to a YEC interpretation of the flood account.

For his part, Brian Godawa despises the film with a passion. He hates the film the way Anakin Skywalker hates the Tusken Raiders. To a great extent, this is driven by his opposition to the misanthropy of modern environmentalism. And he dislikes Aronofsky commandeering the flood account as a vehicle to promote that ideology.

Yet Godawa is a contributor to the Biologos Foundation. The current flagship of theistic evolution. The nemesis of young-earth creationism and intelligent-design theory. So it's striking when Ken Ham and Brian Godawa, who are hermeneutical antagonists, both pan the film. 

Wesley J. Smith reprobates the film for the same basic reason Godawa does. Misanthropic environmentalism. However, I've never been clear on Smith's theological outlook, if any. He used to be a consumer advocate, coauthoring four books with Ralph Nader. So he's hard to peg.

Finally, there's E. Calvin Beisner. He's an OPC elder, and archfoe of the radical environmentalist agenda. So you might expect him to pounce on the film for the same reasons Smith and Godawa pan it. Yet he came away with a more varied impression of the film:

I saw Darren Aronofsky's NOAH yesterday and actually enjoyed it. It was far less bad than I anticipated and in some respects was quite good. Its environmentalist message was muted from what one expected from the first script--still there, but not dominant. It (mostly) "gets" the sinfulness of man and the justice of God that responds in righteous wrath. It doesn't get God's mercy and grace or the way Noah and the flood and its aftermath presaged the person and atoning work of Christ. It pretty poignantly portrays the difficulties of a walk of faith and obedience to God, but because in it God Himself never speaks, it misses the real foundation of that faith--propositional revelation from the God who speaks and shows (to adopt the title of Carl F. H. Henry's magnum opus).
As Thornbury points out in his review, the movie is far less simplistic than lots of Christians will think. Yes, it’s got wrong theology—lots of it. (So have Lewis’s Narnia tales and the movies based on those, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tales and the movies based on those.)
Two of the reviews I linked point out, rightly, the misrepresentation of the fallen angels. Even that isn’t so straightforward as it might first appear, though. The movie presents them as fallen not because they were more merciful than God but because they disobeyed the Creator by helping Cain’s descendants damage the earth through industrialism—which of course is itself untrue. And yes, the movie falsely portrays some fallen angels as repenting and serving God’s purposes after all and so earning their way back into heaven. What do we expect from moviemakers who don’t understand the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone or Christ’s unique relationship to the human race through the incarnation that differs so starkly from His relationship with the angels [Hebrews 1–2]? But the idea that some fallen angels might decide to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing—well, it’s not true to what the Bible teaches about angels, but it is partially true to what the Bible teaches about human sinners: that even the unregenerate are capable of doing what theologians call “civic righteousness,” not true righteousness, which arises from true love of the true God, but right acts good for the community. Even the idea that those fallen angels who helped Noah understood mercy while the Creator didn’t needs to be met with careful literary consideration. Is the movie intentionally conveying that message as true? Or is it conveying the unregenerate mind’s failure to understand the pretty inscrutable fact that God is holy and righteous and just and hates sin and is loving and gracious and merciful and loves sinners, and causes His sun to shine and His rain to fall on the just and the unjust—so that from the perspective of the unregenerate [including the moviemakers], those fallen angels “got” mercy better than God did, though in reality [not the perspective of the moviemakers], God did was indeed merciful?
And there are many, many more theological errors in the movie—each of those reviews covering some, none covering all, and plenty not covered in any of them. It is filled with major theological errors—most importantly that it completely misses the grace and mercy of God and the place of Noah and the flood in redemptive history as pointers to the atoning and restoring work of Christ on the cross and in His resurrection and ascension and His rule from heaven over and through His church—all stuff, by the way, that would hardly have been understood at all by Noah, or even Abraham, or even Moses, or even David, or even any of the Prophets (1 Peter 1:10-12), which suggests that a movie that leaves those things unclear, barely hinted at (as in the rainbow at the end), does a pretty good job of portraying how (little and poorly) the flood would have been understood by the people in Noah’s own age.
I might add: the movie also presented creation as a six-day affair, and it didn't try to add thousands or millions or billions of years between creation and Noah. In that regard, it was faithful to the Genesis text. Would that lots of folks who get down on it for its (many and real and sometimes very bad) departures from the Biblical text would give it credit for getting that part at least generally right.

So, as I say, it's somewhat hard to pigeonhole reactions to the film. They don't necessarily correlate with where you range along the theological spectrum. Some who might be predisposed to pan it like it. Some who might be predisposed to pan it like it (with caveats).