Noah (2014)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
A man who suffers visions of an apocalyptic deluge takes measures to protect his family from the coming flood.
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10 films that influenced Noah
What critics say influenced Noah
While images of damned human flesh tumbling from mountaintops recall DeMille, and a shot following a drop of rain nods towards the "tear of God" from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ , Noah has more in common with the traditions of sci-fi and fantasy than with the Ten Commandments.
If I had to compare "Noah" to any previous Biblical movies, I'd go with Mel Gibson's " The Passion of the Christ " and Martin Scorsese's " The Last Temptation of Christ ," not because the stories are similar (obviously they aren't; Old Testament vs. New) but because, even when you're confused or disgusted or bored, you still feel the director's mad passion radiating from the screen.
Regardless of your feelings about either movie, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” qualifies and so does Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
And speaking of odious bigots, Aronofsky’s film also begs comparison with another high-profile Lenten-season release from a decade ago, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Others have pointed out that The Passion of the Christ and The Nativity Story and The Ten Commandments — films that these protesters have never complained about — also contain things that aren’t in the Bible.
The Passion of the Christ debate might determine whether Noah is worth one's time and money.
Aronofsky has created something that’s gritty in its earthiness and epic in scale, his strong visual approach providing many awe-inspiring moments, such as a depiction of the Genesis creation story that is shown in theological evolutionary fashion, reminding of similar imagery from Terrence Malick’s equally perplexing The Tree of Life .
And its quieter moments are often just as beautiful; a sequence in which Noah retells the story of creation, illustrated as a series of time-lapse images, recalls the most breathtaking images from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life .
…history of the universe in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life retold in a minute or two, but no less imposingly oneiric.
Aronofsky also adds some psychedelic seasoning to the seven-day recipe for cooking the cosmos, culminating in an evolutionary mash-up that rivals Terrence Malick’s marvelous nature sequences in “The Tree of Life.”
Think Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life , recut as a Requiem for a Dream amphetamine rush : it suggests evolution, but looks wholly miraculous.
Which brings us to Darren Aronofsky’s Noah , a work of art in film and a theological exploration of the ways of God and man, the likes of which have not been seen on the big screen since No Country for Old Men or The Tree of Life.
It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston.
While director Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan’’) isn’t above trying to goose his Scripture with a little PG-13 sex and violence, as entertainment, this epic ultimately lands roughly midway between Cecil B. DeMille’s high-camp “The Ten Commandments’’ and the high-art provocations of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.’’
The result is a movie that forgoes all the fun of the Cecil B. DeMille era of “The Ten Commandments” or “Samson and Delilah.”
A blight of wickedness has fallen on this blighted land (the film was shot in bleakest Iceland) and roving hordes of marauders — more reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” than anything biblical — pillage at will.
Cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera renders Noah’s landscape as one ravaged by cataclysm; the mud-smeared denizens of a barren, craggy land remind of the post-apocalyptic melancholy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
These early passages resemble nothing so much as the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with our heroes beset by roving gangs of vandals; in one encounter, they rescue an orphaned girl, Ila, and adopt her gratefully into the family circle.
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He has dealt with spiritual-religious themes before in Pi and his underrated The Fountain, so Aronofsky’s interest in the Noah story seems refreshingly consistent and organic rather than some self-indulgent fluke.
Never one to balk at troubling the waters, Darren Aronofsky dives into the story of Noah with all of the tumultuous, spiritual curiosity that has defined his career, particularly more contemplative adventures like The Fountain and Pi.
This is not the first time Aronofsky has delved into matters of the spiritual with such epic scope, as seen with his polarising 2006 movie The Fountain .
His movies, from Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain (a test of patience even for die-hard fans) to The Wrestler and Black Swan , differ wildly in style and themes, but all plunge boldly into the minds of characters in crisis.
If there’s a correlative in Aronofsky’s filmography, it’s clearly the beautiful folly of The Fountain , another flawed but ambitious attempt to ask big spiritual questions in a fantastical context.
The technical effects are spectacular — this is a rare blockbuster for Aronofsky, even as it visually recalls the magical realism of his ambitious, meandering “The Fountain” from 2007.
Ominous scenes of blackened hordes descending upon Noah's wooden fortress call to mind the Orc attacks from The Lord of the Rings , while the floods themselves evoke the dystopian disaster of Waterworld .
That dark new take on the story — and Crowe’s intense, good, often scary performance — keeps “Noah” afloat despite clunky moments such as the “Waterworld”-like duds, the mega-rock angels (voiced mainly by Nick Nolte and Frank Langella) and scenes of a stowaway villain hiding between the emu and the weasels.
Aronofsky has pumped the Old Testament’s slim narrative of the old man and the sea with a heavy-metal load of sci-fi fantasy, and forged an apocalyptic saga that owes as much to Waterworld and The Lord of the Rings as to Genesis.
Mr. Jodorowsky is the Chilean director who arguably invented the midnight movie with two features that have become cult classics, "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain."
The Biblical flood is the original apocalypse story – which filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan,” “The Wrestler,” “Pi”) creatively re-interprets with a timely, resonant, ecological doomsday message.
Aronofsky, director of "Pi," "Requiem for a Dream," "The Fountain" and "Black Swan," is a fantasist whose characters are driven by hallucination or obsession.
Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah,” an artistic interpretation of the Biblical tale, is an utterly confounding movie; it’s filled with the kind of bravura filmmaking and visual storytelling we’ve come to expect from the director of “Pi,” “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan,” but the script – and the execution of that script – is so clumsy and over-written that nothing in it sticks.
Director Darren Aronofsky ("Pi"/"The Fountain"/"Requiem for a Dream") co-writes with Ari Handel, Aronofsky's Harvard roomie, this uneven, awkwardly executed, controversial biblical epic disaster flick.
This is his sixth film in 16 years — Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Black Swan precede it — and they all have their moments.
Aronofsky's a determined sort of fever dreamer, whose work so far includes "Black Swan" and "The Wrestler" in the popular success category, along with his earlier "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream."
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In addition, as punishment by God for leaving heaven against His will, the Watchers have been transformed into enormous rocklike creatures that look like stony versions of the Ents in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002).
Ironically, that makes for a more interesting movie – the Watchers are by far the best Transformers ever put on film, and their defense of the Ark rivals the attack of the Ents at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
The tone, the scope, the very design of the massive, stone-covered fallen angels now known as Watchers—this feels closer to a modern fantasy tale like “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” than “Son of God”.
He gives us a scenery-chewing bad guy in the form of Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), ruler of the wicked land, who rustles up an army to “crush those giants” and take the ark as his own personal safe haven; this results in a giant battle sequence that feels like something out of The Two Towers.
The long, rich history of bible based movies has shown that secular filmmakers often make the more interesting films ( The Gospel According to St. Matthew , King of Kings ) due to their ability to step outside of the box and look at scripture in a different light.