The Reel Critic: Noah

The Rotten Tomatoes description of Noah says that it succeeds in “… bringing the Bible epic into the 21st century.” That’s a case of damning with faint praise if I’ve ever seen it. What does it mean to “modernize” an old, canonical story? What sorts of prejudices are inherent in that kind of project? The recipe for Hollywood modernization often reads something like the following. Begin with the basic outline of a very famous story, preferably one that might inspire controversy so as to attract attention. Contort the story’s structure to fit a conventional action-movie plot-arc. Cast attractive people, preferably very famous attractive people. Saddle the thing with as many banalities and love scenes as it can handle before it collapses under the weight of its own clichés. For example, look to Dante’s Inferno, Beowulf, that Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters thing from last summer and so on.

I would have immediately assumed that Noah would follow the above checklist – where “modernize” is a synonym for “let’s make this story super badass, bro” – if not for the bizarre fact that Darren Aronofsky, of all people, is Noah’s director. Aronofsky is a man who made his name with the hallucinogenic math thriller (math thriller?) called Pi, which cost him a whopping $60,000 to make. Aronofsky has since directed strange, personal movies like Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. With Aronofsky at the helm, Noah is at least willing to take some chances here and there. It’s in the first 10 minutes that we are introduced to a gang of giant rock men, fallen angels called “the watchers,” who appear precisely like you’d imagine Bible-era megatrons to look.

This degree of outlandishness proves good for the film. Certainly one of the appeals of Noah is the slow unveiling of the original tale: how it depicts the actual arc-building and the animals boarding the arc. These revelations are more interesting when mixed with Aronofsky’s strange vision.  At the same time, because we do know the basic narrative, the obligatory sweeping battle scenes exist purely as visual spectacle. Noah will build an arc and the animals will board the arc, regardless of the fight’s outcome. These enormous battles simultaneously lack drama and feel totally irrelevant to everything else in the film.

The world of Noah, like the battle scenes, strongly resembles a fantasy epic  à la Tolkien, but the film’s visual tone is inconsistent. In one breath we get the giant rock men grunting and lumbering around with a huge sense of scale, and in another we are snapped back towards a claustrophobic, faux-documentary handheld style that recalls Aronofsky’s unique imagery in Pi. The contrast is jarring, as if the bizarre fantasy that Aronofsky wants to make is at war with another, more standard special-effects driven epic. This feeling colors most of the final product.

To its credit, Noah does gesture in the direction of Genesis’ themes, particularly in the characterization of Noah the man. Russell Crowe seems like an inescapable casting choice as Noah, but his presence forces the character out of the stereotypical noble and upright caricature that we’ve seen in other retellings of the flood story. Instead, this is a narcissistic, broken man who believes that the human race deserves to die. More than that, there is no woman who might bare children to begin humanity anew; humans have wrecked the earth completely and utterly. There is a very clear attempt at a statement about climate change with Noah. However, we only see the bones of themes like this, or of any real artistic vision, because they are buried beneath computer generated images and genre conventions.

So I suppose Aronofsky has succeeded in modernizing the Noah story, which essentially is to say that Aronofsky has succeeded in producing a loud, hulking Hollywood action movie with just the occasional glimpse of imagination to pull us along. The movie is obnoxious in parts (many parts) and just kind-of boring in others. Now here I am complaining about an action movie starring Russell Crowe being loud and obnoxious though. It is what it is. It could have been much more than what it is, but if you want an action movie you’ve got Noah, which is no more interesting or insipid than the rest.