Non-Stop Bible Action – Another-Day’s ‘Noah’ Review

Growing up as an immense fan of both comics and film, there are a few things that have come out that I never wanted to see, and a few more that I just never thought I would ever see. Somehow, Darren Aronofsky’s take on Noah manages to be both those things at once. It’s a Biblical parable by way of Lord of the Rings starring Russell Crowe as a Noah who resembles an MMA fighter, and perhaps it’s because of that strange mix that it feels more than a little lopsided.

Set in the vaguely ancient times of pre-flood Earth, Noah kicks off with a handy guide to the history of the Earth. Well, the history of the Earth if you believe that once, rock monsters lived among us and helped a crazy man build a giant animal husbandry coffin in a magical forest. And hey, if I’d known the Bible had that much crazy shit in it, I’d either have signed up as a Christian a long time ago or alerted God that JRR Tolkien needed to be sued for copyright infringement.

The story is one we’re all very familiar with, of course: Noah is a dude whose dad died like a punk when he was trying to pass on to him their family’s legendary shiny snakeskin heirloom (let me just point out that this is the equivalent of your dad giving you his boots from when he used to be a roadie for Whitesnake). Noah grows up alone in the mountains but, along the way, he find a wife and raise their family of three boys. They scrounge for mould off the side of rocks, only taking what they need from nature, and refuse to kill animals to eat them (although they do kill people who try to kill animals – making them the absolute worst kind of vegans). Inevitably though, things in their dry, craggly Mordor home change dramatically when God makes the scene by sending Noah a dream in which all of Earth is annihilated in a flood.

From there the story takes a few familiar twists and turns as Noah leads his family across the land to see his grandfather, and eventually to building the ark in a magical forest so that he, his family and all the animals (two-by-two, hoorah! HOORAH!) can survive the coming watery apocalypse that will no doubt lead to the setting of the movie Waterworld.

It would be well-trodden ground for us all were it not for one simple thing… those rock monsters (that are IN The Bible) that I mentioned before. Did you know there were rock monsters in the Bible? More specifically, these are fallen angels who speak like Nick Nolte. And for the sin of trying to help man out, they were turned into really bad CGI monsters. But they pretty much epitomize the problems with the first half of this movie. It is chock full of cool ideas and interesting attempts at visualizing the imagery from the Bible, but the style that director Darren Aronofsky has used to convey most of his message is best described as “painterly”, and at worst, “looks like an episode of Spartacus”.

The film alternates between beautiful landscape shots and ones that look like someone assembled stock imagery into a collage along a film strip. It is… not all that great.

Those are the film’s obvious weaknesses but it does have its strengths, although they lie more in story than execution. While the first half of the film wanders through its plot, trying to blend elements of fantasy and action movies into the story of a lonely hippie on a trip with his family, its second half reveals a far more succinct message. I wondered before why we often gravitate toward these old stories we’ve all heard and told a dozen times, but Aronofsky does a solid job of addressing my concerns when he gets to the part of the tale that feels like a valid parable.

The simplicity of having Noah and his family, along with his enemy, on board the ark all at the same time creates a perfect localized version of the Earth and Garden of Eden – it’s the small stage that a director like Aronofsky does his best work on after all. When he’s given the leverage to make something epic, it feels like he’s swamped by the task. When things are reduced to this smaller environment, he excels at creating a sense of mood, pace and his themes actually come to the fore quite nicely.

Aronofsky’s interpretation of things seem to be that we will always return to the same state, no matter what happens to us, because we are human beings and we are naturally imperfect. Just as Adam and Eve were lulled by the serpent into eating the apple, and their sons split over their actions, so too does Noah’s family face a serpent in their midst and have to overcome that scenario. That they ultimately do, in some form or another though, belies both the flaw in humanity and our biggest hope for salvation. We crave conflict and see it wherever we can, and it’s this that drives us toward progress and ultimately our demise. Unfortunately this doesn’t feel like the crux of the film because, yet again, these themes are mixed in with a cocktail of other ideas. Crowe’s performance is as strong as ever but the way in which his character slips into a kind of determined madness and stalks his family like he’s in The Shining distracts from the weight of what he’s dealing with more than it helps it.

Likewise, the film’s drawn out ending steals thunder from its mid-film climax, and its awkward rush to end its arc with stirring visuals, very little dialogue and a quick wrap-up undoes any favor Aronofsky earned during the second act. I’d say that Noah is worth seeing if you’re open to challenging humanity’s supposed right to progress, but you’ll only really get to enjoy that part of the film if you can stomach all the rock monsters and the action sequences first. I barely could and found myself bored for an hour before things got intriguing.