Headscratchers / Noah

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• How is Naameh so confident that Ila's abdominal wound has rendered her infertile? Unless she sees that the child's ovaries and uterus are clearly destroyed, it seems to me a pretty bold statement for a person with no medical equipment or knowledge.
• When Noah is listing off all the reasons why he and his family are also sinful, he says "Shem is blinded by desire, Ham is covetous, and Japheth lives only to please." Wait, what? How can living to please others possibly be considered sinful or bad by any standard?
  • He might mean it to say Japeth is a suck-up, and has no spine of his own to stand up against requests he knows are wrong.
  • Moreover, Noah's position (which is intended to be unrealistically-extreme) is that even his and Naameh's willingness to kill in defense of their sons' lives is an unpardonable evil. This is hypocritical on the one hand - after all, most of the "innocent" animals he's saving adhere to the same standard; for many of the herbivores, defending their young is the only reason they'd kill - and an explanation for why he can't acknowledge Japeth's selflessness as a good thing, on the other: he expects the boy would only grow up to be a Papa Wolf too.
  • I think we're not supposed to agree with Noah's stance here. From what I gather, he's trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - trying to back up his increasing paranoia that humanity is bad. What he lists about his sons are Informed Flaws that foreshadow how his viewpoint is wrong.
  • I think one way of seeing it that Noah knows he and Naameh would be willing kill to to defend their children like the animals, but the animals do not have a capacity for evil and or destroying the world like humans, including his children, And he sees that as an inherent and unchangeable flaw in mankind.
• If the descendants of Cain were so industrial, why didn't they use the abundant wood to build their own ark?
  • Probably Tubal-Cain didn't tell them about the approaching deluge, because they'd have done just that rather than formed the army he wanted. For him, hijacking Noah's ark was about power and saying Screw Destiny to God, not just about personal or cultural survival.
  • Tubal-Cain may have figured that he couldn't build enough arks to save all his people, and they'd end up fighting for seats before they got any arks finished. If so, hijacking Noah's ark was his best chance to save some of his people.
• Come to that, if it was such an advanced society, how is it there were no other boats just lying around that people could use? More of a headscratcher against the original story than anything but still.
  • That's a problem that a lot of skeptic have pointed out for ages, we know about fisher cultures with very good navigation skills existing since the Bronze Age, specially in the Pacific.
• Was that a dinosaur that Noah sees slaughtered in the Ark just before Tubal-Cain attacks him?
  • If you look closely, you will see it has long ears. It's actually an Aardvark
    • Then why are there still aardvarks? :P More seriously, it's probably some other fossil species which resembles an aardvark in that case, or otherwise a fantasy creature much like the other animals killed by the Cainites.
    • Maybe the female aardvark was already pregnant with a male offspring when she boarded the Ark, and Tubal-Cain ate the adult male? It's not as if the genetic bottleneck for every species could get much worse, after all...
  • It could be a Genius Bonus bit of Fridge Brilliance: one of the aardvark's claims to fame is that it's a mammal with no close living relatives. Presumably it used to have some in the film's Verse, before Tubal-Cain ate its sister species.
  • Not sure if told in the movie but in the original story not all animals were in pairs of two, some animals had seven pairs.
  • A new thought: perhaps it was actually the Set animal? That would certainly explain its looks and why that particular creature is basically unknown in real-life.
• So what was that creature that Noah sees the Cainite poachers hunting at the beginning?
  • It had scales like a pangolin, so could've been a relative of that family that no longer exists thanks to the Cainites. Could be a Genius Bonus, as genetic analysis places pangolins as a sister taxon to carnivores, so it could be a transitional form from before the former became specialist insect-nest raiders.
• If the Watchers only formed a half circle formation around the Ark (seen in the scene where the raindrop falls on Noah's eye), couldn't the Cainites just walk around them and take the ark?
  • They were advancing in a huge mass, which doesn't work so well through dense trees. Especially not against opponents who are big and strong enough to push those trees over on your advancing ranks.
• Wouldn't Noah killing Illa's children not be enough to secure humanity's extinction? As far as can be told, she's completely healed and should be able to have more kids even if her first birth was boys, yet he says nothing about killing her too.
  • For that matter, he doesn't consider the possibility of castrating all three of his own sons rather than killing anyone.
  • Because he clearly doesn't want to kill his grandchildren since y'know he doesn't in the end. On some level he knew it was wrong but he was so focused on the mission that he nearly did anyway.
• Isn't it a Broken Aesop that, despite all the film's environmental screeds and the emphasis on how every individual animal on the Ark is priceless, old Methuselah - supposedly a paragon of wisdom and grace - scours the forest until he can find and eat the last berry on Earth? Berries are seeds, after all, so he's most likely nomming a species right down into extinction just like the Cainites have been doing. And not even for his own survival, but just so he can Go Out with a Smile.
  • Possibly the Creator made those berries pop up spontaneously as a gift, in recognition of Methuselah's past heroism, much like He made those little white flowers appear to Noah. Plus, the plants are generally assumed to survive the Flood underwater, so that berry bush could sprout another crop in a couple of months' time.

• Cain the first farmer killed Abel the first shepherd because Abel was rewarded when he offered God meat. Then why did Cainites follow the creed of Real Men Eat Meat?
  • Spite? "Oh, so it's meat you like, eh? Well fine then, meat's not ON the menu; meat IS the menu!"
  • Because they ("they" being the writers) wanted to portray evil meat eaters versus good vegetarians, despite it not being true to the Biblical story. Presuming they even knew that; a lot of people don't realize Cain was the farmer and Abel the meat eater and think it's the other way around.
  • Or because the Cainites were eating meat but not offering God His share.
    • Maybe meat was only intended to be used in offerings to the Creator, and livestock were to be reared solely for milk and fleece.
  • According to the Bible, God took agriculture away from Cain after the murder of Abel, in Genesis 4:11-12:
    And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother's blood from your hand.
    If you till the soil, it will no longer give you strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth.

• Why the hell did Noah still let his sons board the ark if he wants to ensure his clan will die too?
  • Probably needs them to help deal with all the work of unloading the animals after the flood.
  • He wanted them to live out their lives and not die horribly like the rest of mankind.

• Cain's civilization is described as somewhat industrialized and powered by fossil fuel yet are shown to be at best post-crusade. Tubal-Cain could have built a steampunk ark of his own instead of attacking Noah's!
  • Yes, but that's not what a man like Tubal-Cain would do. It's seemed easier and faster to take Noah's ark rather than building his own ark.
  • Where did that pride of their industry go? They've got iron, more manpower, and the trees are up for grabs.
  • It took Noah an appreciable amount of time to make his with the help of magic angel rock lords, so maybe by the time that Cain's folks decided to take the flood seriously, they had the tools and supplies but simply not the time.
  • More importantly, they didn't have time or resources sufficient to build enough Arks to accommodate their own numbers. Tubal-Cain's not an idiot; he surely realized that if they built an Ark, his fellow-Cainites would immediately start fighting each other for possession of it, so if there's going to be a battle anyway then they might as well skip the drudgery of construction-work.