The Sci. Fi. Channel has taken on the book of Genesis.
According to this, Noah had two arks, and the one for this movie was the “Monster Ark”. First, they find a hidden chamber at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Second, it has the ‘complete’ manuscript of Genesis. Third, it plays off Genesis 6:4, an obscure reference to something called the Nephilim. Fourth, it says Noah had a second ark, one with a monster of the Nephilim era that could bring back darkness to the earth.
The verse goes, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of God and the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.”
They chased too many possibilities. Here is a sample. Indiana Jones is ripped off for a mysterious map room, a ‘brotherhood’ designed to protect the secret of the scroll, of the ark, and of Noah’s burial place, but no Nazis. The sacred/secular debate takes the form of two scientists leading this expedition, one being a ‘believer’ and the other being a ‘secularist’. Modern politics are taken on when the ark is supposed to be lying in the middle of war-torn Iraq. In line with all my favorite Sci. Fi. movies, it becomes a protracted bug hunt with a heroic ending-and the possibility of a sequel.
Unfortunately, the movie itself was really bad. Here is a gathering of some of the clichéd reviews of bad cable movies: The dialogue was stilted, the characters were lame, the CGI monster was particularly bad, there were some obvious errors of continuity, and they even resurrected an actress that I have not seen in some years (Renee O’Connor from ‘Xena, Warrior Princess’). And Tommy Lister, known as Tiny, gets every clichéd line from a major (or is it a sergeant-major) Marine that I have ever seen. It was so bad, I liked it. The theological debates that the premise should have generated were as scattered as the rest of the movie.
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