Noah: Darren Aronofsky

I never would have pegged Noah as an action hero. But Darren Aronofsky makes several other intriguing changes to the biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood in his film Noah. The film represents this odd combination of high fantasy and post-apocalyptic thrillers. Indeed, the humans and their towns of skeletal ironworks look like a society rebuilt after the bombs have dropped. But I digress. The film had some striking imagery and some inspired sequences, particularly a two-minute Creation montage told from the perspective of evolutionary creationism. The rapid editing in these sequences remind us that, yes, Aronofsky was the same man who directed REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000). I also like Aronofsky's technique of framing characters in the middle of the frame as black silhouettes. Most of the computer generated effects (i.e. the animals) are sub-par. The birds were the only animals that I felt looked real. And even then the computer trickery became painfully apparent during shots where there were hundreds of birds onscreen at once. Curiously, the last third of the film takes place on the ark after the Flood has swallowed the earth. During this section, Noah becomes an outright tyrant at odds with his family. He even tries to kill his new-born granddaughters because he honestly believes that God only meant for him and his family to survive long enough so that they could guarantee the survival of the rest of His creatures. Noah is a different kind of bible film. I can't say that I've ever seen anything like it stylistically or psychologically.

7/10