Noah

Are you in the mood for thrills? Well how about an experience that takes you on a 36 hour ride which includes earthquakes that register 5.3 and 4.4 on the Richter Scale? That not enough? How about we throw in a fatal shooting in the middle of Hollywood which leads to a manhunt and cops searching through everyone's trunks for the killer? You still need more? Well what if I throw in an abundance of high end cars, tons of traffic and a Jon Voight sighting? Am I talking about the latest installment of the  Fast and Furious franchise? No, I'm talking about my recent weekend in Los Angeles! Seriously, all that was missing was me doing rails off of Megan Fox's cleavage while making a "white people do this, black people do that" joke.

And just like you would in reading my last statement, if you were looking for anything closely resembling the Bible in Darren Aronofsky's Noah, then you would be sadly mistaken. Now to Aronofsky's credit, this isn't the first time Hollywood has taken a biblical story and "tried to make art" as he says. There have been plenty of movies that use stories from the Bible as a general outline and try and make an interesting story of their own; but with the recent run of movies such as the Son of Man, The Passion of the Christ, and a few others whose names escape me right now, we kind of forget the fact that these alternatives exist. Perhaps releasing it this close to Easter didn't help either but I am certain that this is why critics loved Noah but audiences have mixed feelings about it.

I too fell into this trap even though I have been following the development of this movie from the very start. There were even stories coming out early that Aronofsky was going to include evil giant sea creatures that resembled the Kraken! So I should have been prepared for what I seeing. But it took about 20 minutes of me saying to myself "Wait! That's not right!" before I reeled myself in and remembered what they were actually trying to do with this film. With that said, it's been some time since I've seen this epic and I am still not quite sure how I feel about it.

In Aronofsky's tale of Noah, he quickly runs through the creation of man and then puts his focus on what happens right after Cain slays his brother Abel. After this event the Earth is apparently only left with the evil descendants of Cain and a few good descendants of the third brother Seth to roam and rule. You are then introduced to Noah (Crowe), a descendant of Seth, along with his beautiful wife (Connelly) their three sons, and a random young girl that they have saved along their journey. Noah has transplanted his family because he has had a vision from The Creator showing him the end of the world, the reason for it, and his role in it. However he must consult his grandfather Methuselah on how he should go about fulfilling his obligation to The Creator before he can start. Once he reaches Methuselah, Method Man (as I call him) not only provides him the additional vision of the Ark he needs to build but also the means to do it. It should be noted that his grandfather is played by Anthony Hopkins, who for some reason looks like the Emperor from the original Star Wars movies in this role.

So the movie goes from there; for some reason there are fallen angels that turn into clumsy looking giant rock men, Cain is apparently the leader of the Wildlings from HBO's Game of Thrones, and Noah's young sons are in need of losing their virginity like RIGHT NOW!!! And you are taken through a weird and uncomfortable emotional ride as you root for and respect but then later hate Noah as he is contemplating doing something unimaginable. The same goes for his middle son Ham (sadly it's not the Ham from The Sandlot) played by Perks of Being a Wallflower's Logan Lerman.

Visually the cgi looks good for the most part and there are some fairly breathtaking scenes. The issue is this movie felt more like Mad Max The Road Warrior then it did a movie about Noah. And don't get me wrong, if Noah was running down wildlings with a muscle car and blowing up random animals with gasoline, then this might have been fresh. But none of that happened; instead you were stuck with a movie whose tone was all over the place.

I get what Aronofsky was trying to do, and that's tell the story of a man who has the weight of saving any semblance of goodness and purity in this world while forsaking the rest at all costs. It just seems that he probably shouldn't have consulted his co writer from the painfully abstract The Fountain on this project. This movie could have been great but instead you just get a near miss that's kind of WEAK.