Petrified angels

I'm going to comment on a positive review of Noah:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/march-web-only/noah.html

I haven't seen the film. I don't plan to. To judge by reviews, I'd find it irritating to watch. Also, I've seen lots of disaster flicks with fancy CGI. 

Noah is another entry in this filmography. It asks big questions: Are humans worth saving? What is the place of justice and mercy in existence? How ought people relate to both powers greater than themselves and to the world in which they dwell?

Are those questions posed the same way we find in Genesis?

But what makes Noah work, even in its more messy bits, is that it usually avoids asking those questions pedantically. Instead, it embeds them in a story shared by the world's major religions (most ancient mythologies as well). 

To say it embeds them in a story shared by the world's major religions (as well as most ancient mythologies) is, if true, decidedly pluralistic. Owes more to the spirit of Joseph Campbell than the Spirit of God.

And it retells the story with a startlingly fresh imagination, generally strong writing, and great acting talent—Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins.

Hopkins is at that age where he's becoming typecast as the generic authoritative patriarch. 

The Bible often leaves out things that make for good storytelling, like dialogue and scene-setting sensory details, because that's not its genre. Even the gospels tell us that Jesus performed many more miracles than are recorded, because there simply isn't enough room in the books for everything.
Noah respects the human's imaginative capacity by thinking of itself as a story about how it could have happened. Where the text says something, Noah does that thing. But where it is silent, the filmmakers worked hard to examine tradition, other texts, and what they know of people to think about one way the story could have worked out. (Even the most controversial of their narrative choices—something I won't spoil for you—has echoes of other Bible stories in it; it's probably not what happened, but things like it happened later, so it's not inconsistent.)

It's true that Gen 6-9 is insufficient to make a feature-length film. If that's the aim, then the screenwriters have to include a lot of filler. 

However, that's not the only way to film the Bible. If you film Bible stories as part of a continuous TV series on the historical narratives of Scripture, then a cinematic version the flood account needn't be 139 minutes long (in the case of Aronofsky's Noah). It doesn't require all that additional padding to turn it into a stand-alone viewing experience.    

Reportedly, the good folks at Industrial Light & Magic (the special effects company founded by George Lucas) did some of their most complicated work on this film, and it shows. The ark is enormous. The animals are fantastical, but plausible. The rock giants (Handel and Aronofsky's rendering of fallen angels, one interpretation of the Bible's "Nephilim") are emotionally resonant in the manner of Peter Jackson's rendering of Tolkien's ents. The account of creation is pushed into hand-drawn animation, which fits its place in the narrative.
I admit it: at first, I found myself raising an eyebrow and wondering how much I should have to suspend my disbelief at some of the things that happened in Noah. For instance: rocks that glow and, when hit, start fires. Giant lumbering fallen angels encased in rock. Plants that sprouted from the ground.
Then I remembered something very important: this is a depiction of an antediluvian world, a world that is both very young and different from the post-flood world. In this world, it has never rained. Snakes apparently had legs, only ten generations ago (see the account of the fall of man in Genesis). Men live for centuries and centuries, something that changed after the flood, according to the Bible. And miracles happen a lot, both before and after the flood.
So when things happen in the movie that seem "magical," I have to remind myself that I'm a modern American living in the twenty-first century, for whom "magic" means "sleight of hand" and "enchantment" is part of fairy tales, not reality.
It would not have been so in the past. And, frankly, as a modern who is also a Christian, I believe in some fairly "magical" stuff—such as the idea that baptism does something significant, or that there is some sense in which the Eucharist is a particular means of grace, or that speaking to an invisible being through prayer makes sense.

The problem with ransacking ancient Near Eastern mythology, 1 Enoch, Middle-Earth, &c., to flesh out the plot is that Noah's world suddenly becomes indistinguishable from Clash of the Titans. You might as well as Marvel Comic Book characters like Thor to liven up the action.  

That makes it less believable, not more believable. That reduces it to generic mythology, interchangeable with spare parts from other myths and pious fictions.