2) The design of the ark
Of all the interpretations of the scriptural text, this one should seem the most obviously faithful, and one that’s visible from some of the film’s promotional material. Noah’s ark often is attributed with a fairly specific imaging that depicts it almost as a cruise ship, but when Noah’s ark is revealed, it’s kind of like “Oh. But, of course.” This is a structure that is appropriately crudely made, but also massive enough in scale to make the housing of the necessary volume of life on earth as believable as it needs to be in visual mythology.
More importantly, it apparently follows the relatively specific biblical description laid out to Noah in building the ark far more closely than these other depictions. The ark of the Bible is prescribed, according to the suggestions of scholars, as a kind of rectangular prism, and an enormous one. Aronofsky has said that the structure that they built for the movie followed these exact specifications, and this was the result. Now, there are the additional questions of how one man and his family were able to build such a structure themselves, but as the movie rather ingeniously demonstrates, they had some extra help.
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