Critics reviews

...These complaints seem trivial when one considers the unprecedented achievement of pulling off a midrashic blockbuster. Noah, with its purposeful ambiguities and allusions to dense scholarly texts, hints at untapped possibilities for mainstream cinema, demonstrating how rich and strange movies can be when they interact with older narrative traditions.

What will happen when Ila miraculously becomes pregnant due to Methuselah's magic? Will Noah turn into Abraham, slaughtering the child... the moment it's born? ... It wouldn't do to reveal how the film resolves these thorny questions – but the fact that such questions even exist in a big Hollywood tentpole is a triumph in itself... Noah is visually spectacular, with the requisite special-effects moments... but it's most impressive as a film of ideas.

Aronofsky's images, including his mercurial special effects, as well as the glowering, red-hot performance by Russell Crowe, do justice to this distinctive vision of struggle with iron-willed faith. But the movie's visionary eccentricity is undercut, tamed, normalized by one unfortunate element: the bewilderingly bombastic music, which seems to be the director's concession to the norms of a studio action film.

Noah is a dark, nightmarish vision of the Old Testament that finally has few affinities with the reassuring piety of the DeMille school. It aspires to a mode of properly visionary imagination, to which end Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel have consulted not just the Old Testament but also such non-canonical sources as the Book of Enoch.

Not for one of Noah's 138 minutes is there a drop of humour, or anything else that much resembles human emotion, to leaven this portentous retelling of the flood myth... [Yet] It's impossible not to feel a genuinely apocalyptic shiver when, as Noah's family eat their rubbish food inside the ark, the screams of the drowning rise above the howling storm and we're granted a glimpse of the last of humanity, clinging to the highest peaks, wave-lashed and pleading for life.

Only one aspect of the natural world seems to interest Aronofsky: the survival of humans. The movie's most egregious distortion comes in an early intertitle, when the descendants of Cain are said to have created an "industrial civilization" that God thinks it best to destroy. The Bible does mention a Cain descendant known for metallurgy, but industrial civilization is no older than the eighteenth century...

It has epic grandeur, fight scenes, and CGI effects worthy of its production and advertising budgets. But underneath all that, it is a quintessentially Aronofskian meditation on obsession. The title character turns out to be an antihero... The film's midrashic structure is only half the story. Thematically as well as substantively, this Noah is a radical theological text.

...Noah is the least bombastic and absurd of the director's six features... Perhaps the most outlandishly entertaining aspect of this otherwise sedate epic is how much Aronofsky and his co-screenwriter Ari Handel have unintentionally made the last of the antediluvian Patriarchs (played with dutiful solemnity by Russell Crowe) sound like a tamer Fred Phelps... Aronofsky's signature grandiosity is too often at odds with—and diminished by—the familial melodrama he has created aboard the vessel.

This is an immense, weird, ungainly, often laughably overwrought and silly movie, an amalgamation of elements from various literary and cinematic forebears. Some elements fuse beautifully and others seem to repel each other; still others float onscreen in isolation, like bits of wreckage carried along by floodwater... And yet there's still a ferocious originality to "Noah." Despite its assemblage of borrowed and stolen and re-imagined pieces, you have never seen anything quite like it.

The lasting achievement of Pi was that it made a gritty little story about a mad mathematician feel cosmically significant. In Noah, the director takes perhaps the most spectacular chapter of the Greatest Story Ever Told and renders it utterly underwhelming.

Noah belongs to that rare class of auteuristic religious opus, in which (often secular) filmmakers twist Scripture to suit their own artistic obsessions. Theoretically, that's cause for celebration, but is the movie itself worthy of praise? Appreciating it in principle—for its singularity and audacity, for its refusal to strictly play by the (good) book—is much easier than worshipping at the altar of Aronofsky's actual achievement.

First things first, however—which is to note that Darren Aronofsky's big-ticket retelling of the biblical legend of Noah (Russell Crowe, so damn serious) is a wildly stupid, yet still train-wreck-fascinating piece of work. The jaw drops early and often, right from an opening dream sequence in which man's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden is presented (laughable digital snake and all) like one of the quick-cut drug montages from the director's Requiem for a Dream (2000).