Noah

It’s been ages since Hollywood gave us a great big, sanctimonious, and wonderfully junky biblical epic, but 2014 promises a return of these goofy and portentous pictures. This year we’ll see the release of the History Channel’s theatrical feature Son of God, Ridley Scott's big-budget Exodus, and the much anticipated semi-prequel to The Passion of The Christ… Mary, Mother of Christ.  But first up, we get director Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, starring Russell Crowe in the title role. If Noah is any indication of what’s to come, then we’re in for even more generic superhero movies this year than I thought.  It’s just that some of them will be based on Bible stories rather than comic books.  Noah could be confused for the third installment of Thor, rather than a return to the old-school biblical blockbusters Hollywood use to churn out, like The Sign of the Cross (1932), Samson and Delilah (1949), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben Hur (1959), and King of Kings (1961). Aronofsky’s film does not even possess the campy qualities or transparent earnestness that, if nothing else, infused the old-Hollywood’s pseudo prestige pictures with their impact and entertainment value. 

CGI technology and budgets exceeding 100 million dollars prove to be the two greatest equalizers in cinema. Almost every large scale picture made these days, be it a superhero movie, a sci-fi adventure, an action thriller, or a biblical epic, looks virtually identical and shares so many narrative characteristics and cast members that it feels pointless to go see them all. It’s not surprising that good filmmakers are drawn to these mega-budget movies that provide the opportunity to work on a huge canvas, access to the latest cinematic tools, the chance to play to a global audience, and the related allure of big financial reward.  But it is surprising that we, the audiences, get suckered into coming back again and again to see essentially the same bad film. Most of these movies end up uninspired and interchangeable because of their focus on spectacle over story, their goal of showcasing and pushing the limits of digital technology, and their requirement to appeal to the broadest possible demographics, which usually means jettisoning inspired nuance and risk-taking.

Nevertheless, many audiences and critics read merit and meaning into these unworthy creations. I suppose the job of a film critic is to find an original angle on every film released, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that, after sitting through the tedious and empty Noah and writing my initial negative capsule, I read so many glowing reviews and deep discussions about the film’s worthiness.  In the case of Noah, intelligent people endlessly discuss the film’s ambitious artistic intentions and its mishandled release by a studio trying to appeal to the lucrative religious audience who made The Passion of the Christ such a mega-hit.  The efforts to look for the positive in Noah can be attributed, not to the film’s actual merits, but to people’s high opinion of its director, Aronofsky, the lauded auteur behind such cinematic works as Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan. I have no doubt that if the credit instead read, “Directed by Michael Bay,” this film would have been panned with the same universal distain as that director’s Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, or any of his Transformers pictures.

In truth there is little difference between the prestigious Noah and those blatantly unchallenging popcorn pictures. They each take one-dimensional stock characters and graft inflated thematic ideas onto them with a clumsy, heavy hand. It doesn’t help that the artistically imagined world of Noah looks virtually identical to the world of Thor (or Transformers or 10,000 BC or Pacific Rim, or pretty much every other digital cinematic landscape). Noah’s fantasy environment is even populated by the biblical equivalent of Transformers; digital rock monsters called Watchers. These stone giants are meant to be fallen angels banished from the Garden of Eden, but they look and sound exactly like Optimist Prime in the Transformers, or the Ents of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, or those four-armed, saber-tooth ape things in John Carter. And just like the recent film versions of Thor, The Wolfman, and Beowulf, Noah features a ubiquitous grey-bearded, sonorous voiced Anthony Hopkins, dispensing critical life lessons to the hero and providing unearned gravitas to the movie. Noah also stars Ray Winstone as its principle human antagonist; perhaps he’ll take over for Hopkins as the go-to wizened old man in future decades.

The story of the Great Flood, as it appears in the book of Genesis, is only four chapters long and short on details. Noah, an over 500 year-old mortal who “found grace in the eyes of God,” is selected by the Creator to survive a great flood that will cleanse the Earth of all humanity. God instructs Noah to build a giant ark and take two of each animal with him to survive the flood. The story’s brevity invites a gifted filmmaker to expand and fill out the narrative in all sorts of ways, while still remaining true to the tale’s themes and plot. Aside from the more intricately detailed accounts of Moses, the Great Flood story has the most cinematic potential of any in the Bible, due to its visually dramatic central event and the iconic and evocative image of a giant wooden boat being tossed about in an all-encompassing stormy sea. But aside from some little-seen silent and animated pictures, and the 1999 TV movie starring Jon Voight, the most well-known popular depictions of this event thus far are Bill Cosby’s classic stand-up routine, “Noah,” and the middle chapter of the John Huston/Dino De Laurentiis film, The Bible: In the Beginning...(1966), which memorably features Huston himself as Noah.

One thing that hasn’t been fully explored in any telling of this story is a sense of what it must have been like for Noah and his family to coexist with all those animals in the tight confines of the ark for 40 days and 40 nights at sea. But Aronofsky and his usual co-writer Ari Handel (The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan) don't attempt to investigate that intriguing aspect of the story because their film doesn’t feature any animals. That’s right, this telling of Noah’s Ark has NO ANIMALS. There is one brief sequence where a line of CGI beasts emerge from the forest and load themselves efficiently into the ark, but this is not achieved with an impressive, eye-popping arrangement of exotic creatures boarding a giant ship (as in the one noteworthy and visually astonishing scene in the Huston film). Instead, we see a by-the-numbers piece of uniform digital animation that blandly conveys the menagerie boarding Aronofsky’s unimpressive rendering of the structure. The beings in this ILM-demo-reel parade look no more credible or distinctive than the rock monsters, and the computer-generated shots aren’t any more impressive then any of the hundreds of digital fly-overs we’ve seen in movies since 1982.

Once the “animals” are on board, the film wastes no time on the potentially fascinating question of how Noah’s family fed them all and kept them from killing each other during the voyage. Instead the writers concoct a magic potion that puts the animals to sleep for the entire journey. This supreme cop-out enables Aronofsky to focus his third act on two utterly banal, boilerplate storylines. The first is the absurdly drawn-out question of whether or not Noah will murder his soon to be born grandchildren in order to satisfy God’s desire for the destruction of the human race. This “will-he-or-won’t-he” scenario lacks any suspense--I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that humanity survives. Therefore, any interest this narrative line holds for us rests entirely on Crowe’s abilities at conveying Noah’s intellectual, emotional, philosophical, and spiritual torture through the shear force of his brooding, manly screen presence. This is too much to ask of any actor.

The second thread is the attempted retribution of Winstone’s villain, who stows away aboard the ark. The revenge subplot is even less satisfying because it comprises the third act of so many Hollywood blockbusters of the past twenty years. Additionally, even if you’re not familiar with the Bible, you feel pretty confident that this pumped up movie-cliché climax was never part of the original story.

For all of Noah’s grand scale and ambition, it is a small and utterly forgettable picture with underwhelming images that will rapidly blur together with the memories of so many other interchangeable blockbusters of its day. It’s a prime example of the biggest problem with big-budget filmmaking in the digital era: that even the most distinctive and celebrated directors end up making the same, generic movie.

NOTE: Since initially writing this review I have since seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which proves that a talented filmmaker (even a director for hire who comes in late and replaces the original director) can indeed create a distinctive piece of cinema within the confides of the mega-budget digital blockbuster: limited time, a pre-ordained release date, the requirement of appealing to the broadest international demographic, the need to "dazzle" audiences with the latest special effects, and the importance of satisfying multiple producers, studio execs, and other critically interested parties. Seeing how well Matt Reeves pulled this off with his Apes sequel makes Aronofsky’s failure with Noah all the more disappointing.