Noah and the Argonauts

Darren Aronofsky specializes in films that are painful to watch: the destructiveness of addiction in Requiem for a Dream; the physical brutality and abuse of The Wrestler; the psychotic self-mutilation of Black Swan. In Noah, the painful viewing is the gratuitous carnage of iron-age tribal warfare set in the period between two apocalypses – one caused by humans, the other by God.

Noah is not a biblical epic in any conventional sense. Context is manufactured out of whole cloth. One critic calls it "the Book of Genesis with a page one rewrite." Almost everything about the antediluvian world seems out of place. The landscape is anything but Middle Eastern (extensive sequences were filmed in Iceland); the costumes look like they came from Land’s End than from the ancient Near East (women in form-fitting pants and cloth jerkins?); the weapons are anachronistically iron-age, and even include a bazooka-like projectile launcher. The antediluvian earth is a world of reptilian goats, magical powers, fire-stones, and a race of stony giants called “watchers” in a bizarre interpretation of extra-biblical myth. (These "fallen angels" are so ridiculous that the producers excluded them from any pre-release publicity shots.) Noah has more in common with the old “dynamation” classics like Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts than The Ten Commandments or The Passion of the Christ.

Yet Noah still manages to be transparently preachy, a self-conscious diatribe about our contemporary ecological crisis. As the film begins, we are told that the “industrial society” of Cain’s descendants has ravaged and destroyed the earth – creating a post-apocalyptic landscape reminiscent of Mad Max or The Road. Noah and his family are the lone faithful remnant of the descendants of Seth, the keepers of the eco-friendly true religion of the Creator, nomads running from the bloodthirsty tribe of Tubal-Cain. The modern subtext later becomes explicit when Aronofsky incorporates images of modern warfare in Noah’s retelling of the story of creation and fall.  

But the issues in Noah are not only ecological. Aronofsky continues to unload his personal baggage with parents in Noah. Parents in his previous films are all deeply flawed people – self-destructive, abusive, and virtually incapable of love. In Noah, the title character is yet another abusive parent: a controlling leader of a family cult, a cold-blooded agent of “divine justice.” Noah is all moral contradiction, a religious sociopath depicted as a vegetarian who will risk his life to rescue an animal yet think nothing of slaughtering humans. But the ultimate abusive parent in Noah is God, whose genocidal impulse and emotional absence are never mitigated, whose justice is only tempered by defiant human compassion. In Noah, the rainbow is just a special effect without theological content.

The film will undoubtedly provoke discussion about care of creation, human and divine will, and the tension between justice and mercy. But the theological content emerges more from Aronofsky’s distortion of the biblical story rather than the source material, creating a confusing mess of biblical theology. Aronofsky proves the old preaching dictum that “a text without a context is a pretext.”

There are some redeeming elements in the film. The narrative structure creatively integrates biblical backstory as flashback. There are moments of visual brilliance, such as the aforementioned creation sequence (which even alludes to evolution). And the CGI action scenes are staged and edited with ferocious energy. But there are also major disappointments. The score is bombastic and overbearing. And, while Aronofsky is often regarded as an actor’s director (his previous four films have generated four Oscar nominations for acting, and one win), the acting in Noah is two-dimensional. Russell Crowe as Noah is alternately obsessed and aggrieved; Jennifer Connolly as Noah’s wife is given nothing for the first 90 minutes until she erupts in maternal rage. Poor Emma Watson as the wife of Shem cries so much in the film that one wonders if 40 days of rain was even necessary. Even Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah is more caricature than character.

Noah is painful to watch, and for all the wrong reasons. Save your money and pass on this silly pseudo-biblical eco-apocalypse fantasy. 1.5 stars out of 4.0.