Looking at the new Exodus: Gods and Kings trailer the other day, I got a bit nostalgic for my shot-by-shot analysis of the original Noah trailers, so I took a look at my old post on that subject and was amused to see that my interpretation of a few shots turned out to be wrong.
For example: I wondered back then if the two hands in the close-up above might belong to Noah and Naameh, or perhaps to Shem and Ila. Well, as everyone who has seen the film knows by now, it turns out these hands belong to Adam and Eve!
In hindsight, I might have figured this out if I had paid closer attention to the background in that shot, which clearly resembles the landscape in this other shot of the two trees at the heart of the Garden of Eden:
Then again, even if I had noticed the similar landscapes, I might have still resisted associating these hands with Adam and Eve, because there was another shot of Eve’s hand in the trailer, and it looked rather different there. Her hand glowed as it plucked the forbidden fruit, whereas the two hands holding each other didn’t:
The filmmakers fixed that by the time the movie came out, though. Here is how the hands ultimately appeared in the film’s creation sequence:
You can also see how the completed version of the shot includes the two trees in the background, whereas the version that appeared in the trailer did not.
Anyway. It’s quite common for trailers to go out with unfinished effects, and in the case of Adam and Eve holding hands, no one who had not seen the film yet would have noticed the difference anyway. It will be interesting to see if any similar changes are made to any of the shots from the Exodus: Gods and Kings trailer.
Noah, incidentally, comes out on Digital HD on Tuesday, and on DVD and Blu-Ray two weeks after that. Pre-order your copies now!
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