Noah: A Review

The problem with making movies based on the Bible nowadays is that nobody can take the material seriously. Ever since the Good Book was hijacked by fundamentalist nutjobs, the popular idea of "Bible movie" has been of overly sentimental, moralistic propaganda aiming to convert and condemn secular society. So if you were looking for new interpretations of stories everyone knows, or even just some entertaining spectacle, you avoided remotely connected to the Bible.

That's a position I've agreed with for a long time. As a survivor of Catholic education, the last thing I needed was another story about how awesome God and Jesus were. Especially when the people adapting the stories would leave out all the visually cool stuff like giants, monsters and demons. But with Noah, Darren Aronofsky looks to return Bible movies to the glory days of Cecil B Demille, full of drama and spectacle, and for the most part succeeds. But along the way he gives audiences an involving, beautiful-looking film that doesn't just re-tell a story everyone already knows but goes greater into depth than I've ever seen with scripture.


Of course we all know this story but part of the depth comes from Aronofsky's expansion, so let's go over it. After the expulsion from Eden the children of Adam & Eve have split into two bloodlines, the line of Cain and the line of Seth. The line of Cain have spread across the Earth, building industrial cities and ravaging the environment while the line of Seth has been whittled down to just Noah (Russell Crowe) and his family. Noah receives a vision from God, who is just called "The Creator" in the film, warning him of a great flood that will wipe out the line of Cain. Aided by his sort-of wizard grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) and the Watchers, angels who chose to fall and help mankind but were trapped in stone forms as punsihment, Noah begins building an ark to survive the flood and hold animals to re-start the Earth. But as construction continues, he is opposed by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) leader of the line of Cain who wishes to take the ark for his own people and the growing suspicions of his family that he may be misinterpreting the Creator's vague directions.

"I'll fight all of you!"- Russell Crowe, out of character.

Noah is visually magnificent with stunning sequences ranging from a gorgeous time-lapse montage of Creation to an entire forest sprouting from a single seed of Eden. But the best visual is undoubtedly the Watchers, the six-armed angels with stone bodies. Dispensing with human silhouettes, they move with strange shuffling gaits and have a unique look never seen before. It's a credit to the artists of ILM that they can convey character with these angels, showing playfulness, redemption, and hatred through the cracks of rock and soft heavenly glow. The ark is impressive as well, the sheer size of the thing doesn't hit the viewer until they see the tiny figures of Noah's family moving around it.

But what works best about Noah, and what sets it apart from other Bible movies, is that Aronofsky's ambiguous depiction of the Creator. He doesn't literally speak to Noah, instead communicating through hallucinatory dreams that Noah has to make sense of himself. And it's this vague, mysterious nature and how the characters react to it that drives the film. Noah is steadfast in trusting the Creator, but it's this loyalty that may be leading him astray and driving him crazy. His family is forced to go along with Noah's idea of the Creator's wishes until his dogmatic view clashes with their personal desires and morality. The stakes are raised to their highest after the flood when they're trapped on the Ark with an increasingly deranged Noah, which Crowe plays as a hollow-eyed sociopath, with the future of the human race at stake and the audience is literally praying for God to intervene.

Tugger, Mark 1

But what hit me hardest about this approach is Tubal-Cain. As the rain begins to fall, he rallies the line of Cain to take the ark by invoking the iron will and collective strength of mankind and the pride that comes from surviving on one's own without help of a heavenly patron. It's a speech that wouldn't sound out of place coming from Braveheart or Aragorn, full of secular humanist rhetoric and not unlike my own personal philosophy. It'd be easy to suggest that this is Aronofsky playing evangelist, showing the person with the closest contemporary viewpoint as a godless villain, but I think it's more the film showing a very grey morality. Don't forget our protagonist is complicit in mass murder, divine or not. Noah has an almost Lovecraftian view of God, portraying the Creator as someone so beyond human understanding as to be completely alien. We can't understand his wishes and actions because they don't make any sense from a human viewpoint and anyone trying to comprehend them goes insane.

Noah is a hell of a movie, injecting drama, emotion, and visual panache back into the moribund blandness of Bible screen adaptations. It's well-acted with great work from Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson and Logan Lerman. And even running at two and half hours it's paced well, going from desperate journey to antediluvian apocalypse to ocean-bound thriller,without ever feeling too long. I know a few will immediately dismiss Noah for its subject material but I would suggest this to the irreligious before the religious. It won't convert you, it's not even trying to, but by bringing the Old Testament back down to the human level it will give some theological meat to chew on. But putting that aside, Noah is still an involving, visually inventive fantasy film that you won't soon forget. The Watchers in particular will stick in your mind.

Final Score: 5/5