Noah is a 2014 American epic biblical-inspired film directed by Darren Aronofsky, written by Aronofsky and Ari Handel, and loosely based on the story of Noah's Ark. The film stars Russell Crowe as Noah along with Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Anthony Hopkins, and Douglas Booth. It was released in North American theaters on March 28, 2014 in 2-D and IMAX while several countries will also release a version of the film converted to 3-D and IMAX 3D.

Score was aces.

As a huge Aranofsky and Crowe...

Emma half naked was worth the ticket price.

As a huge Aronofsky and Crowe fan I had a good feeling about this after the first trailer. Aronofsky brings a cerebral and complex edge to everything he does, investing an unrivalled amount of intelligence to his art. I don't know the guy, but I'd say he's the closest thing to a genius currently working in Hollywood. Not quite Kubrick level, but close.

Unfortunately 'Noah' represents a low in his career.

It's unbalanced, uncertain and unconvincing as historical myth or pure entertainment. It's merits are plentiful, but function independently from the whole. Like an under-cooked pizza with all your favourite ingredients - potentially delicious, yet disappointingly unsatisfying.

Aronofsky is a much bolder filmmaker than this. He's taken liberties and risks with the story, but his version still feels safe. Scenes of brutality are no substitute for challenging your audience with complex ideas and social or philosophical commentary.

The sweeping camera shot that circles around the arc, combined with Mansell's epic score, is spectacular. So to is the motion capture exposition at around the half-way mark, which is one of the most beautifully shot sequences since the Tree of Life. Crowe and the cast are good, the score is outstanding and the visuals are generally top notch. The problem stems from ridiculousness of the story, which Aronofsky either believes too much to challenge, or respects to much to criticise, resulting in a dichotomy between his skill as a filmmaker and the films narrative.

As a result, I couldn't take the melodrama that seriously and felt like there was an uneven focus around varying challenges the characters had to face. The situation with the twin babies should have been arresting to the viewer, but it seemed like forced drama. The degree to which you care depends on the value you place on Noah's loyalty to God. As an atheist, I needed much more convincing. That's not to say my personal belief got in the way of the film, rather that the self-importance of the film demanded a different belief to mine to be taken seriously. If it were more pure fantasy it wouldn't be an issue, but this is presented very much as a biblical tale, albeit one with a darker edge than standard.

Overall I'd say it's an ok film, with moments of greatness undermined by inconsistencies in tonality. It's a challenging ask to make a simple childrens story feel complex, profound and important, and unfortunately for me Noah fell a long way short.

C+

Additional commentary:

This realisation the story surprisingly makes little attempt to improve the plausibility of events. Let's break it down rationally:

The idea of the arc, as portrayed by the film, was to save all land animals from a demise intended for no-good humans descended from a race of bad people who were doing bad things
Apparently this race populated the whole earth and in spite of the multitude of different cultures that must have existed at the time, everyone was bad except for Noah and therefore our entire species needed to be destroyed
All black, brown, white and asian ethnicities and cultures must have evolved from Noah's family in the past 4,000 years since the event
To take one example, Aborigines are a race with more than 40,000 years of cultural history
Forget that though, they really descended from Noah's family in 1/10th the time (after canoing across the Indian or Pacific Ocean to Australia)

There are several million species of land animal that needed to be on board the arc, and in pairs would equal a number between 5 and 10 million strong
The arc is depicted as being 500ft in length with 3 levels
The actual size needed would be at least that of the 'Prelude FLNG'
All animals arrived within a few days of 'God's call'
This means millions of species of land animal had to make their way around the world, often swimming over vast oceans, in order to be saved, at a speed greater than a contemporary warship
In the film, there's only a few thousand species depicted

The flood lasted for a year and covered every corner of the globe
Literally every land mass was fully submerged
This would require the melting of both icecaps plus an increase in our planetary water mass by over a third
Following the end of the flood, some mechanism must have flung the additional water into space, fast-tracked the refreezing of the icecaps, the creation of glaciers and the re-population of continents tens of thousands of miles/km away

You can fairly describe the story as being about an overlord who was shitty with the behaviour of a minority group he created, so he decided to murder the entire species in genocide along with billions of innocent creatures, all to allow the re-population of the earth from the seed of a few of his pals. It's closer to a depiction of Nazi Germany than it is a resource of morality.

You could go on all day with this shit. It's obviously just a story with no basis in reality, and I can't help but feel sorry for people who take it seriously.