Not since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has there been such a (seemingly) shameless grab for the Bible Belt Dollar as Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming Noah, which now has a release date of March 28, 2014.  We suspect the lenthy post-production period means that the film won’t be created entirely in camera, despite the colossal production currently underway in Iceland.  Whatever happened to shooting epic diluvial scenes in giant water tanks? Sheesh.

The film stars Russell Crowe, and the very first still was released today, but we won’t run it because it’s just a bland head shot of Crowe in a ratty “ancient” costume that could just as well be from Gladiator 2: The Elysian Fields (okay, okay, here’s a link). 

Aronofsky has been tweeting other images from the set, including one today in which he asked his followers to caption this image:

Clearly this means “No gay elephants/Republicans allowed,” but we seem to have been the only ones among his followers to bring it up (or as of our reply tweet we were).  On further reflection, we speculated in our reply to Aronofsky that it means no Gheys are allowed on the Ark at all, which they weren’t.

Even though we are by no means militant anything here at PFC, and we are aware that back in Biblical times everyone was closeted and married to someone from the opposite sex—and therefore eligible for passage on the Ark had they just listened—we do believe this is a bit of a problem with retelling this story in this day and age.

Noah is meant to be an allegory about global warming, but we don’t see why the Bible needs to be dragged into this issue, or why it needs to be allegorized with this story in particular, which glorifies “traditional” heterosexual unions, and has other “sinners” wiped away in a cataclysmic flood.  This is unfair because, gleefully chronic sinners though they may be, Gheys and Lesobotrons live in big cities for safety reasons—sort of land-locked arks of their own, if you think about it—and as we all know big cities are less wasteful and greener. Also, cynical grabs for the Bible Belt Dollar conjure images of wackos with “God Hates Fags” placards outside military funerals, but that’s an association we’ll bring up with our therapists if and when we ever see the film.

We would like to believe that Noah is an Aronofsky film, after all, and he is the creator of the superlative Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.  Our first reaction was that he surely can’t be making a straight adaptation (forgive the pun) of the Biblical story.  Sadly, this is the synopsis found online:

NOAH is a close adaptation of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark. In a world ravaged by human sin, Noah is given a divine mission: to build an Ark to save creation from the coming flood. The screenplay was written by Aronofsky and Ari Handel and revised by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter John Logan (GLADIATOR, HUGO).

On the same site we found that synopsis, we also uncovered a French trailer for a graphic novel Aranofsky is releasing in October, presumably to build fanboy excitement for the film itself.  Nary a pink elephant in sight.  Sigh: