In Noah rock monsters help Russell Crowe build a big box that two of every animal magically convene on. If you can accept that then you're in for a treat. So much of the pre-release jabber about Noah went on about how the film was an adaptation of a Biblical text, ignoring that it was Darren Aronofsky in the director's chair. With Paramount giving him final cut on the film (their version, a ninety minute flick with ample hymns was reportedly a disaster), the man behind Requiem For A Dream and Black Swan could fully realise the passion project that had been gestating since his teen years. Not that that development got people excited. To be fair, the trepidation is understandable; general audiences feared a preachy tale, while religious types were expectant of something utterly blasphemous (which ignores that the Biblical epics of the fifties and sixties were only made because they were allowed more nudity). The latter have more of a potent reason to be irked by the film, with gross liberties taken (Emma Watson and Ray Winstone's characters are both movie-constructs), but to get hung up on those Hobbit-like problems misses Aronofky's goal. The film treats the Genesis passage as a fantasy story akin to The Lord Of The Rings, using it as the backdrop for a morality tale, which should really please any side of the argument. Set only ten generations from the Garden of Eden, the whole Cain and Abel falling out is still a topical historical event and the world is a scarred wasteland alien to the modern day Earth. Noah is visually striking and probes much deeper than the story brushed over in school. Even a creationism/evolution mash-up worked, no matter your belief in the content of the words or images.
