Review: ‘Noah’

Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is here after a couple years of anticipation, and this is just about the weirdest, most off-kilter, non-mainstream mainstream movie to come out in theaters since “Watchmen” in 2009. I can only imagine what some people were thinking when less than ten minutes into this very short but well known biblical tale the idea of fallen, multi-limbed angels encased in rock gets introduced and then relied upon heavily throughout the film. Definitely don’t remember giant rock ex-angels in Sunday School. Yet here they are. Okay, let’s back up a bit.

So this Aronofsky fella, he makes a bunch of incredible low budget movies, one of em finally hits and makes some coin, and he finally finds himself able to get his apparent dream project off the ground, which is a big screen version of the Noah story, one that takes up very a couple of pages in the Bible, yet is pretty well known by everyone: God made the world and he made Man. Man got all corrupt and evil, so God was like “time to shake this etch-a-sketch” and he told Noah to make a boat, put two of each animal on it, and ride out the flood that will destroy everyone else. Which Noah did. And then his family somehow repopulated the Earth. Pretty straightforward, not really much there, so why are we even going here with this movie? Didn’t we already get “Evan Almighty?” Isn’t that enough?

Well apparently, Darren had a couple of things on his mind with this “Noah” story, a lot more than just scene after scene of Noah running around in the woods literally tracking down animals to put on his boat. Instead we get all up in the head of Noah (Russell Crowe), a man burdened with a heavy task, “blessed” by the Creator with horrible visions of a world consumed by water and lots and lots of death, forced to do the impossible, all the while dragging his family around and trying to protect them from both the world and eventually himself. And then there’s the PTSD, the survivor’s guilt, the heavy soul of a man ordered by the Creator to allow all of mankind to die in the floods, while he lives on, still believing that as a son of Adam, all men have that same wickedness in their hearts that can cause such a corrupt and evil world. It’s not like when it was just the Garden of Eden, and things were cool and everyone was chill and not all sinful and murderous and shit.

But then there was that whole “Cain kills Abel” thing, and mankind was really doomed forever from that moment on, a point hammered home in a beautiful way during one particularly awesome montage, which is what eventually led to the whole God needs to destroy everything deal (though the word God is never said in this movie, but then again, we all know who they were talking about anyway, besides it was likely more of an effort to avoid an anachronism than anything else). And why should we think that Noah was cool with it the whole time and never had any problems with the idea of his small family being the only people left alive in a world deemed too evil to be allowed to exist?

So that’s why much of what is shown in this movie comes across sort of as a horror film, though maybe more like an adult fairy tale or Brothers Grimm story, because there are definitely some moments in this movie that get really dark and intense, like the aforementioned rock angel monsters called The Watchers, or the pits of dead people, or the sounds of people screaming and shouting for help as Noah sits inside his ark and ignores them, or the hard decisions Noah feels compelled to make, decisions involving daggers and babies, and boy oh boy does it get a little rough on that ark.

Hell, it was rough years before the ark, going back to young Noah watching his father get murdered in front of him (here I think Aronofsky just MIGHT have mixed up his Noah screenplay with his old “Batman: Year One” screenplay), and all the way up through the hard times of making the ark and trying to explain to two of his three sons that their just ain’t enough women to go around, sorry chappies, plus there is this whole deal with the local King, a direct descendant of Cain, wanting to get on board the ark to avoid the floods and the death, which brings with it a Lord of the Rings style battle between legions of men and the giant rock monsters.

Of course since this IS a Darren Aronofsky movie, there is more than a little visual panache throughout the film. He brought back his “hip hop montage” thing he did with “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream,” and he also decided to go with a more supernatural, magical realism sort of style with this story, so when we see images of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, it is pulsating like a beating heart, and there’s some bit of magic to the first skin shed by the first snake in the Garden and how this shed skin is passed down through the generations. And with the way some of the stuff was shot and presented, it adds to that fairy tale, storybook quality, like an image of Noah and his family walking along a ridge, the night sky behind them, casting them in silhouette, as they follow the silhouette of a rock monster guy. In this world, in Noah’s world, miracles of all sorts can and do happen, and it adds a level of mystery and suspense because anything can happen at anytime, as long as the Creator sees it fit anyway.

Now while Christian audiences may find a lot to like in the basic themes of movie in terms of mercy and love and compassion and so forth, I am willing to bet there are a few things in here that will irk some folks of faith. For instance, there is a spectacular sequence in which Noah tells the story of the creation, and the story he tells is the one in Genesis, the whole 7 days thing, but this story is told over an incredible montage that starts with the big bang and goes all the way through life on earth and evolution, from single cell organisms all the way up to primates, at which point there is a cut, and then “man is created.” So this movie almost went as far as saying that through intelligent decision humans come from apes, which just pisses off the conservative right to no end, but it does stop just short of that proclamation, and sticks with the concept of intelligent design.

Then there is this whole deal about how Noah was apparently a green living hippie bastard. When one of his kids picks a flower because it is pretty, Noah admonishes him, telling him that they only take what they need and leave the rest the way it is. Man Noah would hate Valentine’s Day. And floral shops. Then Noah explains to his kids that some of the evil men like to eat meat because they believe it makes them stronger. Maybe Noah doesn’t know about proteins and stuff like that? Anyway he totally presents meat eating as a bad thing, and this idea is reinforced later when the evil King is shown eating a random animal, claiming he “needs to get his strength up,” though how biting the head off a living snake would accomplish that I have no idea. Would most Christians and Bible believers (Bible-lievers?) take to the idea of Noah as the first conservationist and vegetarian advocate?

But those things aside, as long as folks can get past the weird rock monster things that have been hidden from all marketing and advertisements for this movie, they may find the rest of “Noah” to be quite admirable thematically, as it promotes virtues such as integrity, fidelity, mercy and compassion in a world rife with evil and corruption. It also helps that it is a well made, epic movie, with sweeping visuals and very emotional story that does its best to humanize this story as well as Noah himself, making this ancient tale seem more immediate and relatable.

It is what people would have expected from a movie about Noah? Hell no. And that’s what makes the movie work, how wonderfully weird and off center and strange it gets, and how much it embraces the more fantastic and supernatural elements and how it sticks to its guns and gives us the Noah movie we didn’t know we wanted but in fact we really did.