'Noah' (12A)

***

After mankind industrialises and begins to desecrate the Earth, The Creator sends Noah, a descendant of Seth, a series of visions instructing him to build an Ark. Within this Ark will be a breeding pair of every animal on Earth, who will then be saved following the flood that will cleanse the Earth of humanity. Noah and his family, with the help of The Watchers, begin their task of building the vessel, but their work is marred by various trials.

Well, this film is utterly all over the place – there are some good bits, some very strange bits, and some extremely poor moments which made me roll my eyes. This feels more like a sci-fi film, more like a film about a future dystopia, than a Biblical epic – there is even a moment when Noah and his family stumble across an abandoned mine, which looks like something straight out of the Riddick films. Similarly, there is a battle in which the sons of Cain, led by Ray Winstone’s predictably gruff Tubal-cain, try to take the Ark and it just felt like a scene straight out of The Lord of the Rings, particularly the siege upon Helm’s Deep. There are also The Watchers, fallen angels who have been punished by the Creator for coming to Earth to help humanity by being encrusted in the Earth’s surface, who are essentially Transformers (they even have similar voices), but all this weirdness can be forgiven. The main problem stems from the fact that the whole ‘the animals came in two by two, hurrah!’ does not translate well to film – it is just too unbelievable, somehow even more so than the fallen angels stripping trees in order to build the Ark. The scenes wherein all the animals arrive and take their seats on the Ark are obviously meant to be awe-inspiring, but they just come across as being pretty laughable. In fact, there are several moments which are unintentionally laughable, such as when two doves turn to look at each other, and then fly into the sunset, alongside the moment where Ila (Emma Watson) achieves womanhood, as it were, and then immediately has to have sex with her beau, Sham (an extremely drippy Douglas Booth) despite the fact that she has been sent to find her missing half-brother and it has also begun to rain.

The film’s credibility rests upon the shoulders of Russell Crowe (Noah) and Jennifer Connelly, his wife Naameh. Crowe is excellent – portraying his slow descent into madness as the Creator apparently abandons him to build the Ark and leave the rest of humanity to die horribly very well. At the beginning of the film he appears to be a loving father and husband, but he becomes a horribly tortured soul, and Crowe manages both the tender and the dangerous without descending into cliché. Connelly, too, has a hard role to play – she has to give us access to Noah’s sensitive side even when he is in the throes of a religious passion. She is the one who has to keep the family together when they are about to fall apart at the scenes. They are supported by a very good Logan Lerman (the ‘problem child’ Ham), who proves again that he is not just a pretty face. The other two brothers are rather underdeveloped in favour of giving more screen time to Emma Watson’s, Ila, but the moments that focus on the intimacy of the family are some of the strongest in the film.

It isn’t a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just a bit… bizarre. Russell Crowe does a damn fine job of what must be a pretty daunting role, and Jennifer Connelly helps to balance out his zealotries. There are also some interesting issues raised, especially by the Ray Winstone character, who openly asks the Creator why he has abandoned mankind when we are made in his own image. The distinction between who is guilty and who is innocent is also questioned. There is, however, a rather troubling conclusion – how will they repopulate the Earth when they are all related? And, are we to assume that Ray Winstone ate all the unicorns?