NOAH
Grade: B+
Starring: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, Ray Winstone, Logan
Premise: A man begins building a giant watertight vessel after receiving supernatural visions, but the coming apocalypse tests him and his family in grueling, unexpected ways.
Rated PG-13 for intense, disturbing emotional content, strong brutal violence, blood and gory images, and some sensuality
No, I wasn’t expecting a very neat, tidy, God-loves-you experience from Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, but, I must say, I wasn’t expecting that. Aronofsky’s huge film is epic and amazing, yes, but it’s also stark, brutal and terrifying. Two people in my row at the theater walked out well before the end, and they won’t be the only ones; anyone anticipating a Sunday School-worthy treat or a spiritual uplift will be running for the exits. You wanted a Bible-come-to-life movie you could watch at church with the whole congregation? I’m pretty sure Son of God is still playing at your theater, somewhere down the hall.
Okay, okay, okay, no one should really expecting that much of a feel-good experience from a big-screen depiction of a story in which all of humanity is drowned in a huge flood, women, children and all, except for one family. The cutesy, no-one-really-got-hurt story of a guy building an ark and putting animals on it in time for a little waterworks was done eight years ago, in Evan Almighty, if you don’t remember. That’s not what this movie is. In fact, in order to make a story that’s about three pages long in the Bible feature-length, Aronofsky and his scriptwriting partner Ari Handel have taken serious liberties with the context of the story and the characters. As a Bible-believing Christian, I’m wondering if I should be more offended—I know many, many Christian personalities who’ve already seen the film (like Glenn Beck), were appalled. To give you an idea, building the ark and surviving the flood within its walls is actually the easy part for Noah and his family; Aronofsky and Handel throw in an unexpected, gut-wrenching domestic drama that’s more HBO’s Game of Thrones than happy Sunday School story. The movie’s well-done, and if you haven’t left already, it’ll glue you to your seat, but you must be ready. This definitely isn’t the movie most people were hoping for—God is never even referred to as “God”, always as “the Creator”, and that’s a mere footnote compared to some of the inconsistencies Bible-readers will notice—but I’ll be darned if Noah still wasn’t an electrifying, truly sensational piece of filmmaking.
Plot
READ THE BIBLE!!! GENESIS 6-9!!! GO DO IT!!!
Just joking.
After Adam and Eve’s son Cain killed his brother Abel, he fled into the wilderness, and his descendants rose up a vile and violent people who covered the world in darkness. His other brother, Seth, produced a line of people were gentler and more peace-loving. Noah (Russell Crowe) is one of such people. Believing in, and awed by the power of, a heavenly Creator, Noah lives off the land with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and sons. Constantly fleeing from violent, crude descendants of Cain, Noah is at one point beset by disturbing visions of an apocalyptic flood. Confused, he takes his family back to the remote mountain where his grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) lives. The ancient Methuselah has been gifted with great wisdom, as well as some incredible healing abilities, and, in his cave, Noah learns that the coming flood will be real, it will cover the whole world, and he and his family will survive by building an ark, in which they and two of every kind of animal will wait out the catastrophe in order to build a new, better world.
Ten years later, the ark is largely finished, thanks to the constant efforts of Noah and his wife, their grown sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman), and preteen Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll). There’s also an adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson), whom they rescued as a child from the ruins of her family’s village. They’ve also received considerable assistance from The Watchers, deformed fallen angels who disobeyed the Creator’s will and were cursed to wander the earth, abandoned and unrecognizable, caked in rock and sludge. But the building of the ark hasn’t gone unnoticed. A huge swarm of Cain’s descendants, led by regional king Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), has converged on the area, alerted by the gathering clouds and migrating groups of animals. Noah and his family have found a means to put the animals casually to sleep on the ark, but, as it begins raining, Noah realizes his loneliest son, Ham, has snuck off into Tubal-Cain’s camp to try and find a girl he can take as his wife. And then Tubal-Cain leads a huge, armored assault on the ark once he and his men realize the truth of the incoming disaster. As water pours from the ground and sky, The Watchers try to protect Noah and his family from waves of marauders, while Noah searches in vain for Ham and the rest of the family tries to cope with the idea that they can’t save anyone, that the Creator only wants them. Noah himself has been struggling with the idea, and when he senses the Creator is no longer communicating with him, he’s forced to make some drastic decisions on his own.
What Doesn't Work?
For me, Aronofsky and Handel’s biggest misstep occurs about halfway through the film, when a minor character who’s been built up in importance with some intimate, sympathetic touches suffers a horrible fate due to another character’s neglect. If you see the movie, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not just a gut-wrenching moment (nor is it just a-moment-that’s-not-in-the-Bible), it’s ugly and disheartening. While I give kudos to the screenwriters for giving the characters actual memory of this incident--suffering things like guilt, remorse and anguish--rather than simply glossing it over, it’s still the movie’s lowest point. Change that particular character’s fate, or omit that moment entirely, and Noah, overall, is much more redeemable.
Obviously, there are dozens of details those familiar with the Bible story will point out as inaccurate, but one twist Aronofsky and Handel have chosen to particularly highlight is the importance of The Watchers in this story. While there is some biblical evidence for such creatures, they aren’t included in the Noah story, and, here, their hulking, shapeless forms—complete with glowing eyes and rumbling voices—are part Michael Bay’s Transformers and part Peter Jackson’s Ents from The Two Towers. I actually heard some laughter in the theater during one of The Watchers’ early appearances. They look a little silly, and, while the movie justifies their being there, a later scene of The Watchers protecting the ark by slashing, stomping and kicking the attacking members of Tubal-Cain’s army screams Siege of Isengard from Two Towers.
What Works?
Amid all the controversy, Noah is a very fine film, a dark, brooding, thought-provoking epic that is, for me, much more engaging and effective than a dozen Marvel Comics adaptations. Even though the aforementioned ark-storming/ark-protecting scene is way too reminiscent of battle scenes from certain other movies, the sight of this huge battle under cloudy skies and pouring rain, with a piercing musical score and near-overpowering sound effects around it, drives home the terrifying apocalyptic punch of this story. And even afterward, once Noah and his family are in the ark safely while the others drown, there’s no attempt to gloss it over or give the characters amnesia. Much is said about the evil, vile nature of man, and whether any among men are truly good.
The cast is uniformly fine, starting with a magnificent Russell Crowe, in his best role in years as the burly, conflicted Noah. People may want to quibble about the character’s fatalist speeches or his action-hero moments protecting the ark from invaders, but the fact is, this portrayal is perfect material for the gruff, often-detached actor, who, in later sequences, gets to really play with the glint of madness that’s always been present in his eye, from Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind onward. This film reminds you, that, though you’ve rooted for him as Maximus, Cinderella Man and maybe even as Robin Hood, he’s never been a squeaky-clean screen hero, onscreen or off. That idiosyncracy suits him well at the helm of this dark material. The wonderful Jennifer Connelly won an Oscar opposite Crowe as his loyal wife in A Beautiful Mind, and is here terrific as a woman who becomes the heart and the voice of reason in the family as her husband starts to slip further and further into his own head. Emma Watson has a coming-of-age, maturing arc that she portrays so well you won’t even think of Harry Potter, Anthony Hopkins highlights a few scenes as the genial, wizened old Methuselah, and Ray Winstone typically holds his own as a gruff, ruthless warlord.
Noah’s not a neat, tidy film, but it doesn’t have to be. An apocalypse is an apocalypse, whether it’s done with a meteor or a flood, and Aronofsky portrays it as so. There’s a visually-stunning speeded-up sequence in which Aronofsky hints at creation and depicts life on earth in such a way one could argue whether the scene vouches more for evolution, creation, or some combination of the two. Violence isn’t glossed over, cabin fever (if you want to call it that) isn’t glossed over, the entire earth’s population being wiped out isn’t glossed over, and anyone disgusted by the movie’s hints that The Creator/God might ask someone to kill a member of his own family needs to take a good, hard look at the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Noah can be so tough I was seized by the urge to wish the movie would just fast-forward to the end, so I could know how it ended and that everything was okay, but I’m not sorry I saw it. It’s perhaps not quite the Noah movie I would’ve made, but it’s still a challenging and memorable epic.
Content
Dark. There are scenes of mangled people and animals, lots of onscreen deaths, a few big shocks, and the soundtrack roars, shrieks and howls even when it’s not full of people screaming for a place on the ark. Yeeeah. Live the kiddies at home for this one.
Bottom Line
Is there a market for a nearly-R-rated depiction of the biblical Noah’s Ark
NOAH (2014)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written for the Screen by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel
Rated PG-13
Length: 137 minutes
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