Darren Aronofsky’s Noah turns the most familiar story in the Bible into a survival drama about a man who believes his own family should die. That is a hard idea to sell to a studio, and Noah is at its best when it refuses to soften it.
Russell Crowe plays Noah as a true believer, not a kindly patriarch. The film opens with his father, Lamech, killed by king Tubal-cain over land. Noah grows up, marries Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and raises three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Then the dreams start.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures International.
Dreams Send Noah to His Grandfather
Noah sees a deluge in his sleep. He takes his family to find his grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), hoping the old man can explain the visions. On the road they find a group of recently killed people and adopt the lone survivor, a girl named Ila (Emma Watson).
Ila has an abdominal wound. Naameh treats it and then delivers the verdict that shapes the rest of the film: Ila will not be able to bear children. Noah does not yet know what that means for his plan.
The family is chased by the murderers. They escape into the land of the Watchers — fallen angels stranded on Earth as stone creatures after they came down from Heaven to help Adam and Eve when the pair were banished from Eden for eating the Forbidden Fruit. This is not Genesis. It is the Book of Enoch, and Noah wears that debt openly.
A Seed From Eden Grows a Forest
Methuselah helps Noah understand what he has been seeing. He gives him a seed from Eden. Noah plants it. The Watchers arrive the next morning, and some of them call him a liar. Then water spouts from the ground where the seed went in, and a mature forest pops up around the group.
That settles it. The Watchers decide Noah serves the Creator. They help him build an ark to preserve life after the Flood.
The sequence is the film’s cleanest piece of filmmaking. It is also where Aronofsky’s ambition starts to outrun his running time. The Watchers are massive stone figures with voices supplied by Nick Nolte, Mark Margolis, and Kevin Durand, and they look like nothing else in the biblical-epic business. They also take up a lot of room in a movie that still has to get to the Flood.
Tubal-cain Watches the Birds Arrive
Years pass. The ark nears completion. Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) notices a huge flock of birds flying toward it, then snakes, insects, amphibians, and reptiles. He leads his followers to confront Noah.
Noah defies him. He says there is no escape for the line of Cain, whose sins ravaged the land. The Watchers form a defensive circle, and Tubal-cain retreats. He starts building weapons to take the ark by force.
Winstone plays Tubal-cain as a man with a case, not a cartoon. He is the only person in the film arguing that humanity deserves to continue on its own terms, and the script lets him make that argument. Noah does not have a good answer. He has a flood.
Noah Refuses to Find Wives for His Sons
Animals come to the ark and are sedated with incense so they will sleep through the Flood. Ila is in love with Shem (Douglas Booth). Noah goes to the refugee camp to find wives for his sons. He watches the people there and sees moral decay. He abandons the effort.
What follows is the film’s real subject. Noah becomes devastated by the idea that his family is meant to die out — that the ark is for the animals, and his sons are a mistake he has to correct. Crowe plays this turn without a wink. He is not a villain. He is a man who has decided that obedience means killing his own line.
Connelly is the film’s anchor through all of it. Naameh is the one who keeps insisting that her husband is still her husband. Connelly does more with a look across a deck than most of the script’s speeches manage.
Where the Movie Works and Where It Sags
The cast is deep and mostly well used. Logan Lerman’s Ham is the son who cracks first, and Lerman makes the resentment legible. Hopkins has fun with Methuselah. Marton Csokas appears as Lamech. Madison Davenport plays Na’el, Ham’s love interest. Douglas Booth’s Shem is the least interesting of the brothers, which is a writing problem more than a performance one.
Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel built the screenplay from Genesis and the Book of Enoch, and the extra-biblical material is the film’s signature. The Watchers, the seed, the incense, the refugee camp — none of it is in the Sunday-school version. Noah is at its most alive when it is being strange.
It is also 138 minutes long, and it feels it. The middle stretch, where the family waits out the years and the ark rises plank by plank, sags. Aronofsky made his name on films that move like a pulse. Here he has to build a boat, and the pace goes slack.
Bans, Backlash, and a $359 Million Gross
Noah drew criticism for what some audiences read as environmentalist politics and for leaning on sources outside the Bible. It was denied release in China, according to an anonymous source, for “religion-related reasons.” Several Muslim countries banned it over its depiction of prophets venerated in Islam.
Those fights are worth noting because they misread the movie. Noah is not a sermon about recycling. It is a movie about a man who concludes that humanity is a failed experiment and that his job is to let it end. The environmental reading is a surface reading. The body count is the point.
The film grossed over $359 million worldwide, making it Aronofsky’s highest-grossing film to date. Paramount Pictures released it in North American theaters on March 28, 2014, in 2D and IMAX, with a 3D and IMAX 3D version going out in several other countries. It received generally positive reviews.
The Casting That Almost Was
The production history explains some of the film’s shape. Aronofsky offered the role of Noah to Christian Bale and Michael Fassbender. Both passed because of prior commitments. Bale went on to play Moses in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Dakota Fanning was originally cast as Ila but left over a scheduling conflict. Julianne Moore was considered for Naameh. Liam Neeson, Liev Schreiber, and Val Kilmer were considered for Tubal-cain. Aronofsky reportedly wanted an actor with the grit and size to hold the screen against Crowe.
He got that in Winstone. The near-misses are interesting mostly as a reminder of how many versions of this film nearly existed. The one that did exist is committed to its own weirdness.
A Verdict on Noah
Noah is a genuine swing. It takes a story everyone thinks they know and asks the question the story usually avoids: what kind of man would agree to this? Crowe’s answer is not comforting, and Aronofsky does not let the audience off with a hymn.
The problems are real. The film is too long. The Watchers are more interesting than the human drama for stretches. The third act’s moral crisis is stronger than its resolution. And the movie never quite decides whether Tubal-cain is wrong.
But the ambition counts for something. This is not a safe Bible epic with a famous face on the poster. It is a director using studio money to make a film about faith, extinction, and a father’s willingness to kill his children. That it got made at all is the story.
Noah lands at 6.8 of 10. It is worth the watch for Crowe, Connelly, and Winstone, and for the sight of a blockbuster that would rather be unsettling than reassuring.
KEY FACTS
– Title: Noah (2014)
– Director: Darren Aronofsky
– Writers: Ari Handel, Darren Aronofsky
– Runtime: 138 minutes
– Genres: Drama, Adventure
– Release date: March 28, 2014 (North America)
– Worldwide gross: over $359 million
– Score: 6.8 of 10
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