Movie reviews: Noah, Divergent, Rio 2
A hard rain’s gonna fall in Darren Aronofsky’s an inventive and occasionally combative retelling of the Old Testament story of flood, divine retribution and human salvation. Noah (Russell Crowe) receives a vision from the Creator that warns of a deluge that will wipe an irredeemably wicked mankind from the face of the earth, and proceeds to build an ark that will save the world’s flesh and fowl. While the basic blueprint will be familiar, Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel expand the tale to include mythic elements with echoes of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, harking back to Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in Eden in order to introduce fallen angels who have incurred the Creator’s displeasure for attempting to help mankind come to terms with its bleak existence. It’s an ambitious attempt to please both those who believe in the Bible as a literal text and those who understand the story as a cautionary fable, with Aronofsky’s epic vision encapsulated in a sequence in which Noah relates the Biblical story of creation over visuals that offer a brief history of the theory of evolution. It’s no great criticism to say that Noah is a noble failure: where some aspects, such as the ‘rock-giant’ fallen angels, are clumsily rendered, the post-apocalyptic setting and fatalistic atmosphere are hauntingly achieved. While Ray Winstone’s Cockney accent grates, his representation of anarchy in a lawless, godless land is a chilling one. Russell Crowe is in towering form as the brooding, reluctant prophet of doom charged with an impossible task, and he gets strong support from Jennifer Connelly as Noah’s wife Naameh, Logan Lerman as his son Ham, and Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah.
