Noah is a dazzling fantasy written with both a 2,000 year-old scripture and an added dash of 21st century mentality as its source material. Director Darren Aronofsky is both a visual master and a philosopher. With Noah, it’s obvious that he’s less enthralled with recreating a text word-for-word, but would rather explore its ideas and produce his share of questions. The big one here is a planet on the brink of self-destruction in order to insure its simultaneous cleansing and rebirth. What is the exact purpose of it?
Despite his creative diversions, Aronofsky remains true to the Bible: Noah is bleak and huge in scale, filled with genocide and death but eventually ends with a modicum of hope in humankind and morality. In other words, this is true Old Testament stuff here.
Noah takes liberties with the Book of Genesis. None of them hinder the teachings of Bible, but enhances them with modern sentiments such as the idea that Noah, a good descendant of Abel, wasn’t all pure or that his evil human descendants of Cain, such as their fictitious leader, Tubal-cain (Ray Winston), were not without their share of innocent victims. There’s a contrast between the two factions, but the lines drawn between good and bad aren’t as vivid.
The complications begin when Noah, having survived his father’s slaying to Tubal-cain’s hands at a young age, grows to become and adult and has a family of three sons of his wife, Naameh. Noah soon has dreams of apocalyptic warnings from the Creator (yes, God is a character here). But Noah is unsure of God’s exact demands: Is humankind meant to survive the flood or are they beyond redemption? Or is Noah merely the final tool left to complete God’s task: the eradication of ALL humankind to preserve the Earth and all of its remaining inhabitants?
For a while, Noah sees the creatures and plants of the world as victims to Cain’s greed and destruction. Noah is played with beautiful torture and glumness by Russel Crowe, who questions the nature of his actions with every wooden plank he carries in order to construct a giant ark capable of protecting one pair of every animal species to insure their survival during the Creator’s great flood.
The flood itself is a marvel of special effects, but Aronofsky wisely avoids dwelling on it. The real intrigue when Noah and his family finally enter and wait out the months of rain and flood. Noah remains convinced that the human race is an extinct species which leads to some dynamic twists and character intrigues that stray far from the Biblical texts, but add of layer of insight that asks questions such as nature versus man and the complex grey divider between good and evil. This opens the floor to some acting exchanged between Crowe, his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and his adopted “daughter”, Ila (played in a career-defining role by Emma Watson).
Noah only falters whenever it tries to be too much of an epic. The main plot contrivance is the introduction of the fallen angels, known as the “Watchers” who are trapped in a rock-like exterior by the Creator as penance for their failures during the Earth’s creation. They remain on Earth and lay dormant until Noah convinces them to assist in the construction on the ark and repel the evil human factions who wish to board during the great flood. The effects are occasionally wondrous, but can stray only a few pixels away from a fantasy movie out of Tolkien. Inevitably, their existence feels like a prop for another film and contributes little to the underlying philosophy. Their dialog is restricted during the film’s midsection and fails to add another level of fictional interest.
However, this an Aronofsky film, which means there’s a visual element unique to this kind of studio blockbuster. Aronofsky paints a world torn assunder by man: barren landscapes and muted colors paint an world torn by dread and evil. It also instills a common theme about the raping of the Earth which remains a poignant debate in the 21st century.
Noah is a breath of fresh air. It’s a $100 million epic film from Paramount Pictures that actually takes risks and creative liberties in order to tell a more personal story. I believe the Biblical story of Noah has been enough times to where Araonofsky is excused to create his own spin to counter every film based on the life of Jesus with a Caucasian in the lead.
This is epic story-telling with a brain and a heart. It invites us to ponder over the state of the world of B.C., of today and of tomorrow. This is the ballsiest expensive film in years! It just happens to share commonalities with the most printed, cherished piece of text in the history of mankind — and does it justice, changes and all.
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