Noah (2014) - Review.

What were Darren Aronofsky's motivations in filming the story of Noah and the Great Flood?

It seems likely he intended to provide a parable about the coming horrors of man-made climate change (and, to a lesser extent, to promote veganism). Of course, it isn't a very interesting or affecting parable. That happens when you beat people over the head with relentlessly bombastic storytelling and self-righteous moralizing. And I'm someone that thinks we need to do something about climate change!

Who is Aronofsky trying to reach with this parable? Right-wing climate change deniers? I shouldn't think so. The whole thing with them is that whatever happens to the Earth's climate is in God's hands. If things go bad, it's God's punishment - not against them, but against everyone else - and is warranted. These are people that yammer endlessly about the end times and want their apocalypse now, now, now. For many of these folks, a Great Flood isn't a threat, but a fantasy.

These people aren't running from the great cleansing, Darren - they all think they're Noah.

I wonder if Aronofsky may have wanted to re-visit an earlier period of epic Golden Age Hollywood - i.e., to pay tribute to the likes of DeMille. Alas, the Hollywood period this film more closely recalls is the era of studio decay in the 1960s when a desperate industry began trying to make films bigger and bigger because they were confused over how to compete with Television. Spectacle über alles. The belief in many quarters is that studios eventually stumbled upon the notion that making good movies that speak to modern audiences was the way to get people into theaters. Then again, maybe it was just that Hollywood needed to produce better blockbusters.

Now we have digital media and 50 inch Black Friday HDTVs. Hollywood has been stuck in a rut of spectacle upon spectacle. To date it has been profitable (if it has meant fewer studio movies and less creativity in those studio movies), and Hollywood is more corporate than it ever has been, so a creative counter-attack isn't presently in the cards.

Anyway, if such a counter ever comes it apparently will have to rise from the bottom ranks, as some big-name directors like Aronofsky seem to enjoy going bigger and louder while others fiddle around with their 1970s tributes. Which brings us to our biblical epic that turns the Noah story into a computer effects-laden action film. It's so over-the-top that any deeper message gets, pardon the pun, drowned out.

Returning to motivation, maybe Aronofsky secretly wanted to make a Transformers movie, and the closest he could get is the ludicrous rock monsters he incorporates into Noah. Or maybe he just thought it would be cool to have some massive war scenes with carnage on an epic scale but couldn't figure out a sensible plot device to get rid of misanthropic Noah's human army when the flood comes. So we get angels-turned-rock-monsters that bash in the heads of a horde of people in a ridiculous siege scene at the Ark (set to a score that merely moves from shriek to shriek rather than embellishing anything).

The rock monsters are a great example of how Aronofsky doesn't just want to tell the Noah story, but rather wants to Hollywood the shit out of it.

I don't think Aronofsky wanted to visit upon the more difficult aspects of Noah's story. So if you're looking to discover what actually happened between Ham and Noah, or what happened with Canaan, look elsewhere (there is no Canaan here, for Noah cursing his descendants into servitude would mess up the silly happy ending). Instead, Ham is a confused, but ultimately good-hearted young lad that leaves to wander the Earth in an effort to reconcile his anger at the loss of a loved one - he's going to be the next Batman.

If we're looking to find Aronofsky's motivations for making this movie based on what the film actually does best, however, perhaps we should conclude that the purpose is to illustrate just how ludicrous the stories in the Bible can be. I suspect that part of the negative reaction among some fundamentalist Christian circles is not so much over the film's inaccuracies, but that it tells a story that isn't exactly plausible in the first place - and then jerks that implausibility up to 11 (and illustrates in the second half that Noah, if he ever existed, was probably just a nutcase). Or maybe the fundamentalists are just uncomfortable with the otherwise inescapable conclusion that the post-Noah world was re-populated via incest. Or perhaps Noah's strident environmentalism is just bad for business.

Maybe what Aronofsky wanted after all was to tell a ludicrous story, embellish it to make it orders of magnitude more ludicrous, and see if he's nonetheless talented enough to get the audience to suspend their disbelief and to make it work as a biblical epic for a new, CGI world. It didn't work for me, but, hey, as I write this it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 76%. Long live spectacle, I guess.

Side-note to people whining that the movie doesn't use the specific English word God (rather instead calling Him the Creator): grow up.

Screened in a theater at the Arclight Sherman Oaks. The earthquake during the film was probably more effective at converting the non-believers than the movie.