When God (Mor­gan Free­man) approach­es Evan Bax­ter (Steve Car­rell) about becom­ing Noah, it requires some lifestyle changes. Bax­ter, a news anchor from Bruce Almighty who has become a con­gress­man, is com­pelled to grows a bushy white beard, dis­cov­ers an appre­ci­a­tion for the brown robes favored by Charl­ton Hes­ton’s Moses, and sud­den­ly has a han­ker­ing for anoth­er of Moses’ favorites – unleav­ened bread. His wife oblig­es by offer­ing pita, and since nei­ther the Bax­ters, the direc­tor nor the audi­ence real­ize that pita is leav­ened, every­one is happy.

Any­one look­ing for a retelling of Noah’s flood that obsess­es over the glar­ing holes in that sto­ry will have to con­tent them­selves argu­ing with peo­ple at the new­ly opened cre­ation­ist muse­um. The movie, at least, is wise enough to use poop for comedic pur­pos­es, and not to attempt an answer to the ques­tion raised by a news­cast­er: “With all these species, what’s become of all the feces?” 

Direc­tor Tom Shady­ac and writer Steve Oed­erk­erk seem to have tak­en the grow­ing “cre­ation care” move­ment to heart with this movie, but with all the sub­tle­ty you might expect from a Hol­ly­wood chil­dren’s movie based on a reli­gious theme. (Spoil­ers ahoy!) Evan learns that his cor­pu­lent­ly evil con­gres­sion­al patron (John Good­man) has used his pow­er to buy up fed­er­al parks and turn them into sub­di­vi­sions. His cor­rupt cor­ner-cut­ting results in shod­dy con­struc­tion to crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, which fails exact­ly when God told Evan some­thing would go amiss.

For bet­ter or for worse, the film does­n’t dwell on theod­i­cy here. Yes, God knew months ahead of time that this faulty con­struc­tion would cause a flood, and for what­ev­er rea­son, deter­mined that the best response was not to guide an engi­neer to inspect that facil­i­ty, but to give Evan Bax­ter a beard, robe, lum­ber, hand­tools, and “Ark-build­ing for Dum­mies.” In Gen­e­sis, the ark is meant as a test of Noah’s faith. Evan’s ark-build­ing is a result of God leav­ing him no choice how­ev­er hard he tries to resist. Evan has already com­plet­ed the ark by the time he rec­og­niz­ing the moral risks inher­ent in the path to pow­er he had cho­sen – sign­ing on to bills that would sell of nation­al parks in exchange for Con­gres­sion­al advancement. 

True, his Hum­mer gets washed away by the flood, but that only means that he had not rec­og­nized the moral mes­sage being offered until it was too late. The God of Gen­e­sis turns peo­ple into salt pil­lars for less, and the God of Evan Almighty remem­bers doing it. 

The kids ahead of me in the the­atre enjoyed them­selves immense­ly, and I don’t mean to get over­ly aca­d­e­m­ic about what should be a fun sum­mer movie. On the oth­er hand, these old sto­ries are worth pre­serv­ing, and the film’s approach to the sto­ry of the ark is too sim­i­lar to slack­tivist’s descrip­tion of non-lit­er­al Bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ism. Here is slack­tivist’s descrip­tion of the Noah story:

Q: Where do rain­bows come from?

A: Self­ish­ness is destruc­tive — to you and to every liv­ing crea­ture. Remem­ber that every time you see a rainbow.

That les­son exists some­where in the movie, but, like the peo­ple who sur­vey Mt. Ararat look­ing for 3000 year-old planks, it obsess­es too much over pet­ty details, and miss­es the lit­er­al (or at least lit­er­ary) point of the sto­ry. Those sorts of peo­ple, the peo­ple who build arks in their back­yards or who make movies about guys mak­ing arks in their back­yards, run the risk, as slack­tivist points out, of “approach[ing] these sto­ries with the same incom­pre­hen­sion as that of peo­ple who don’t under­stand jokes. ‘What kind of bar?’ they ask. You try to ignore them, to get on to the punch line, to the point, but they keep inter­rupt­ing. ‘A duck? I don’t think you’d be allowed in the bar if you were car­ry­ing a duck.’ Such peo­ple are par­tic­u­lar­ly infu­ri­at­ing when you’re try­ing to tell a real­ly good joke. They’re even more infu­ri­at­ing when you’re try­ing to tell a real­ly impor­tant story.”