The Movie Time Trap and Noah Have a lot in Common

If you haven't seen the movie Timetrap, this post contains lots of spoilers.

During Sabbath school, people in my Sabbath school class were discussing what it must have been like for Noah and his family when they stepped off the ark. Listening to the discussion, I started to think of a movie I watched a while back called Time Trap. It's about a professor who goes missing while investigating a series of caves and the grad students who go searching for him. Almost immediately after entering the gave, things take a bad turn and they end up trapped below ground. At one point, they send a scout to the surface via scaling the wall (since they've lost their equipment and not everyone has the ability to climb out). When she reaches the surface it's a waste land, there's no cell reception, and a weird triangular thing is in the sky. It is from this experience that they discover time moves differently in the gave than it does on the surface. It turns out the deeper in the cave they go, the slower time moves for them or the faster time is moving on the surface. There's a lot of plot on why the professor was interested in the caves and what they find down there, but what makes me relate it to Noah is the scene I just mentioned, and the final moments of the movie. In the end, they are rescued humans of the future—humans who live in outerspace (on the weird trangluar thing in the sky 😂). They are given a chance to live in the new civilization where they have healing waters that bring people back to life and cure ailments.

When Noah got on the ark, mankind was thriving in the worldly sense of the word. The Bible says people were eating and drinking and marrying right up to the day of the flood (Matthew 24:38). I imagine one day people were moving about, buying and selling in the markets, throwing feasts, dancing and singing, and then suddenly there was silence and emptiness. I imagine something akin to surviving a tornado—one minute you're running to your basement to seek shelter and when you emerge, your whole neighborhood is gone. Now that we've experienced COVID, imagine the days of early March 2020, and then suddenly the entire world was shut down.

When the students in Time Trap send someone to the surface, they believe they've been in the cave for an hour or so. In their minds, all the person has to do is call for help so someone can come rescue them. However, when the person reaches the surface, gone are the cell phone towers that would have allowed that communication. The terrain is nothing like it was only "an hour" before when they entered the cave. Imagine going into your house, then walking back outside moments later to discover all your neighbors' houses are gone. Forest and weeds have overtaken everything and wild creatures are roaming your neighborhood freely. Or worse (like the movie), everything is a barren wasteland; there are no homes, no trees, no animals, just dust and dirt. I imagine that's how the first days of the flood were for Noah. Everything and everyone (other than his immediate family) was gone, buried under water. Sure God gave him the plans for the ark, and he had been planning for the flood, but in the midst of the flood I wonder if Noah started to fret about what to do after the flood.

Time Trap ends with the people in the gave being rescued and taken aboard a space ship. In truth, the space ship seems a metaphor for Heaven. Part of the mystery of the cave is water that heals (a Fountain of Youth, if you will) and this water is aboard the ship. Injured members of the group are healed and members of the group who were killed are brought back to life. They are the last of their kind as the humans who save them have evolved into a different subspecies of humanoid.[1] Similarly, when the ark comes to rest, Noah and his family are the last of their kind in a very foreign world. Granted, the flood would have damaged much of the vegetaion of the earth so it would not have been Heaven-like, but it was a new start. In theory it had the potential to turn in to a paradise. Noah and his family have been survived the storm and now they have the opportunity to live out the rest of their lives.

Subsequently, Noah get's drunk—did he bring wine with him on the boat in anticipation because you know, it takes a little minute for things to ferment... As we discussed inth the Sabbath school class, Noah was likely overwhelmed by what happened. Though the movie ends on a positive note, you have to wonder how the students felt when they processed that they would never see their friends and family again.

Although both the students of the movie and Noah have much more permanent experiences, living through COVID has brought so much more clarity to what it must have felt like for Noah. Such a sudden shift can be traumatic. What do you think it was like for Noah and his family when they stepped off the ark?

References and Footnotes

1. This is not an endorsment of macro evolution, just a statement of what is portrayed in the movie