Despite wild deviations in spiritual themes and execution, nothing in Noah approaches sacrilege or surrender, making this an acutely sensible biblical epic. It may simply be too strange for the masses to notice.
Aronofsky’s sixth film is not the Noah you know, but a hundred-million-dollar Chinese whisper; a familiar story made newly poetic and strange with a flavour that’s less Genesis than Revelation.
Noah is more of a surrealist nightmare disaster picture fused to a parable of human greed and compassion, all based on the bestselling book of all time, the Bible, mainly the Book of Genesis.
It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But Noah makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The purists can always go argue over “God Isn’t Dead.” The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.
The movie as a whole is a mixed bag. It's overlong and a times sluggish. The fights and battles, designed to give an epic fantasy feel to the movie, are grave miscalculations.
The director’s vision is so dark — and Mr. Crowe’s grumbling, sour-stomach persona so much like a Tums commercial — that you don’t care much what happens to him or his ark, which looks like a big barge with a stove pipe in the middle.
What could have made Noah work is the same sense of urgency – of fateful craziness – that made "Pi" so memorable, and which also factored into the fatal obsessions of "The Wrestler" and "Black Swan" (two very flawed movies that admittedly benefited from stronger lead performances than the one here).