Just about every kind of disaster film has appeared on screens big and small in the past few years, so it was only a matter of time before some producer turned to the Bible for inspiration. The result is Noah’s Ark, a two-part mini-series produced by Robert Halmi Sr., the renowned showman who has made it his mission to bring literary classics such as Gulliver’s Travels, The Odyssey and Moby Dick to TV sets everywhere.
Floods, volcanoes, meteors, tornadoes, shipwrecks — Noah’s Ark has it all. The film also begins with a glaring anachronism. In Genesis, the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah are not destroyed until hundreds of years after Noah’s lifetime. But in Halmi’s version, scripted by Peter Barnes, Noah (Jon Voight) is a native Sodomite, albeit a righteous one, who flees the town shortly before its destruction; his best friend Lot (F. Murray Abraham) also escapes, even though he is decidedly not righteous.
Years pass, and Noah’s sons grow into handsome young men — all of whom are despised by the local villagers because, while the town suffers from a drought, Noah and his family seem to live in divinely ordained prosperity on a nearby farm. (It doesn’t help that Noah’s sons interrupt a virgin-sacrificing ritual with the help of some heavenly pyrotechnics.)
Then God tells Noah and his family to build an ark, and so they do. The second part of the film concerns the flood itself, and it’s almost entirely fictitious. Lot returns as the captain of a pirate ship, sporting an eye-patch and a full complement of grappling hooks. James Coburn has a brief cameo as a salesman in a primitive paddlewheeler who mourns the passing of monetary systems and sells Noah some liquor (for which there is at least some sort of biblical precedent).