Noah: Russell Crowe in Darren Aronofsky film — Russell Crowe as Noah: militant enforcer. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Noah: an unholy mess drowning in unbiblical detail

This article is more than 10 years old

Russell Crowe tries to add depth to Darren Aronofsky's flood blockbuster, but it's sunk by preposterous embellishment

Noah (2014)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Entertainment grade: D–
History grade: Fail

Noah is a figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the last of the antediluvian patriarchs.

Age

Most historians, apart from the really way-out ones, accept that Noah is a mythical figure – there being no evidence for his existence outside ancient folkloric tradition. Things do get a bit vague with really ancient history, though, so let's roll with it. The film begins with Noah as a boy, going through some sort of Conan the Barbarian-style snake ritual with his father Lemech. A raiding party appears and does his dad in. According to the Bible, Noah was not a teenager when his father died: he was 595 years old.

Characters

The grown-up, now 600-year-old Noah (Russell Crowe, who gives the strongest possible performance in a weakly scripted role) lives on a blasted heath with his wife Naamah (Jennifer Connelly) and three sons. They are the descendents of Seth, brother of Cain and Abel. Cain's descendants now rule the world, and have chuffed up its ecology by mining a mineral called zohar. It is not clear what zohar does, apart from flaring when it burns and being a MacGuffin for baddie Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) to chase after. Also there are a load of fallen angels called the Watchers (which may remind you of the Watchers' Council from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who have turned into giant rock-monsters (which may remind you of the giant rock-monster from Galaxy Quest). No, the giant rock-monsters aren't in the Bible (though the Watchers may be representations of the Nephilim). Nor is Buffy. Sorry.

Environment

Tubal-Cain is mentioned in Genesis 4:22, forging tools out of bronze and iron. He does a fair bit of forging in the film, and seems to have invented a lot of heavy industrial technology which they definitely didn't have in the bronze age. Noah, meanwhile, is modernised as a kind of militant vegetarian, militant heteronormativity-enforcer and psychopathic religious fundamentalist, ready to bump off everybody in the world because some of them occasionally eat a sort of badly animated armadillo-dog thing and have admittedly somewhat flubbed their environmental management. He is grossly unsympathetic, even when he adopts an injured orphan girl. "I want my daddy to sing to me," she coos to him. We don't, because some of us have seen Les Misérables and remember how Russell Crowe's singing went last time. As well as bringing a pillow for the long stretches of this film which are unbelievably silly and dull, you may require earplugs.

Tone

The animals duly arrive two by two. The production design is violently ugly: the sweeping CGI scenes of ark embarkation look garish, unconvincing and poorly cobbled together; the landscapes are rendered in an oversaturated, kitsch colour palette; the stop-motion style movement of evolution (yes, they chuck that in) and the Watchers is pretentious and distracting. The overall effect is of a 1980s prog-rock video. Don't tell Russell Crowe, or he might start singing again. Meanwhile, Tubal-Cain and his followers lurk in the forest, eating stray animals that don't make it to the ark. If this film had the slightest sense of humour, it might at least have shown him munching on a unicorn. Unfortunately, it takes itself extremely seriously. Viewers may find it hard to follow suit.

Plot

The family Noah get on the boat and leave everyone else to die horribly, because God says so. Various unbiblical subplots are bunged in to make the 150 days they spend afloat less tedious: Tubal-Cain stows away (he didn't), two of Noah's sons don't have wives (they all did) and Ham is jealous of Shem who does (he wasn't); Shem has a barren wife (she wasn't); then she gets magically pregnant and Noah decides he must murder her baby, again because God says so (nope, and nope). None of this makes the story interesting, because the characters are so unappealing. Noah is horrible, his wife is a drip, his kids are also drips apart from Ham who is a wally, and you're not supposed to like the baddie. You might have been able to root for the animals but, perhaps owing to the cost of having a massive cast of CGI creatures hopping and squirming in every scene, Naamah sedates them for the duration of their voyage with a magic potion. This film could really have been cheered up with a mischievous-yet-lovable spider monkey or wise-cracking platypus.

Debauchery

It's a huge relief when the floodwaters recede and the ark grinds to a halt on a reappearing mountaintop. Sadly, that's not the end of the film. Director Darren Aronofsky couldn't resist squashing in the weird bit when Noah gets drunk and naked in front of his sons. Unlike most of the stuff that happens in this film, this is in the Bible – Genesis 9:20-25. However, its inclusion here, in a kind of limping, inconclusive last act that swipes at trying to rehabilitate its abject main character, does nothing to rescue the preposterous narrative.