Since You Didn’t Ask…

Okay, since we have a little free time, let’s take on something vastly unimportant: the problem of sprawling Biblical epics, such as the forthcoming Noah film.

Why is the pre flood world of the Bible always depicted as technologically primitive? Nothing in Genesis says it’s so.

What Genesis does say is, the world was a magical place full of half-breed demigods, the offspring of angels and smoking hot human women. Did none of their pillow talk include how to do better than a mud hut?

Magic was in regular practice. Sorcerers abounded.

At some point all the animals talked. Did their speech gradually die out, once Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden? Did their ability to speak die with the same Fall of Man that Adam and Eve suffered? Or were they chatting all along in the pre flood world, and only lost it during the trauma of the cataclysm itself?

What was the technological level, pre-destruction? Did they have flying cars and laser guns? Advanced medicine? Why not? All of that could have been destroyed in the big flood.

Not saying something existed isn’t the same as saying something didn’t exist.

Judging entirely by the just-released trailer, the new Crowe movie takes the same approach every other Bible film and story has done: the world before the flood was exactly the same as the world immediately following: sticks and skins and a few mud huts.

What a waste. You have a giant world-destroying flood. Who’s to say the destroyed world wasn’t the magical and technological marvel I posit above? That way, when the flood resets everything, starting us once again at sticks and stones, the loss is even more poignant.

Face it, kids. The Biblical flood is the first and best post apocalypse story. We just can’t seem to realize it because we’re living in the post apocalypse. What is at the heart of every post apocalypse story? Loss. We’ve lost so much that made us human and civilized. Now we’re back to savagery and have to start again.

It’s silly to think the worldwide flood did nothing worse than temporarily pause the steady pace of technological improvement. It was primitive pre flood, just as primitive post flood and only then did we started innovating? Bunk, I say! Bunk!

I’d like to see the story redone showing the wondrous world that existed before the cataclysm. The advance construction methods of the giant ship. The elite forces of animal gatherers, using their flying barges to get all the critters in place to board the arc. The crashing of all those flying craft once the rains start, because, “Shit! What the fuck is all this water from the sky, which has never ever happened before? The entire sky is broken!” And, not being constructed to account for a phenomena that’s never occurred before, all the flying things go down, down, down.

No, you don’t have to employ those specific ideas and questions, just start thinking a little more outside the arc.

Our world, pre flood, is a setting ripe with possibilities for a sprawling fantasy epic.

It’s going to really piss me off if I have to write this myself. I’m too busy.