NOAH

What do you get if you take the Old Testament, Kabbalah texts, Eastern mysticism and Gnostic gospel accounts and throw them all in a blender? The answer is Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. Even if you think you’ve heard the story before it has to be said that Aronofsky will have something to surprise you. Whether it’s the six-armed stone giants, the biblical rocket launchers or ancient version of chloroform is up to you. Don’t except the Voice of God to come booming down from the heavens or even whisper to someone in a dream, God in this case is “sir-not-appearing-in-this –picture.” Why would Aronofsky go to the trouble of including all these strange and disparate elements? Simply as a vehicle to get his message -that man’s principal duty is to care for the environment –across. Now I’ve nothing against films with a moral or a message, it usually means that the filmmaker will have more passion invested in the project as it’s about their personal beliefs. In the case of Noah though it appears to be very much ‘message first, plot second’. This puts strains on the third act in particular which descends into a bit of a mess (several people at the screening I was at walked out). There are two things that are the film’s principal assets; the first is the flood scenes themselves which are brutally uncompromising in showing the devastating result of the deluge, the moans of the doomed echoing round the arc are haunting not just to Noah and his family but also to the audience. The second is Clint Mansell’s score which manages to rouse feeling of grandeur and scale to bolster the on-screen action (or lack of it). One of the main thing that drags the film down, for me, is that Noah is such an erratic and often unsympathetic character. Obviously we want real people and not cardboard cut-outs from the children’s illustrated bible, but as a central character I just found him to behave so randomly that it took away from seeing him as a real person . Naamah, Noah’s wife, on the other hands, is a far more interesting character and is played well by Jennifer Connelly who is badly underused. One has to wonder if the film would have worked better from her point of view. FINAL VERDICT 5/10 Good set pieces but overall it disappoints.