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domarzioneLet me preface this by saying that Noah was not a movie I was eager to see or one that I would have paid money to see. But I did pay for a membership a MoMA and, through them, there was a ticket to see the movie with a Q-and-A with director Darren Aronofsky afterward. I figured I'd see the movie and then slip out before the Q-and-A because I didn't care that much.
Turns out I needed to slip out before the Q-and-A because my only question to the director would have been "Were you drunk?"
This movie is terrible. Really, really terrible. And not in the enjoyable Bad Movie way. Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of my all-time favorite flicks; I enjoy a good B movie. This is not a good B movie. This is a movie with an A-list cast, an A-list director, and the CGI budget of Avatar that somehow turned out to be what would happen if Tommy Wiseau decided to rewrite the screenplays of the Lord of the Rings movies after falling asleep watching Waterworld.
There are stone Ents, who are really fallen angels, but they're totally Ents and watching their endless subplot and fight scenes makes the Entwash look like the best rave ever.
And Anthony Hopkins is wearing Gollum's hairpiece and spends all of his screen time crouched down and muttering about his precious (red berries).
I didn't have high hopes for the movie, but I figured it might at least be the less ridiculous biblical epic than Exodus: Gods and Kings. And then ten seconds into the movie, the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden turns out to be shaped like a human heart and starts pulsating. So I quickly switched gears to hoping it would at least be quality cheese, but it's not. It's actually boring as heck for long stretches and not visually appealing at all because 85% of the movie is CGI and the entire film is done in a dark, muted, washed out palette.
The dialogue is comically bad -- stilted, predictable -- and the line readings are arguably worse considering we've seen almost everyone here do better elsewhere. Also, Logan Lerman was apparently told to watch Christian Slater in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and copy every mannerism as well as the look.
There are so many anachronisms that you'd get alcohol poisoning doing a drinking game out of them. Perfectly bored long firearms! Steel and iron weapons we watch get forged by men wearing metal welding face shields with eye slots! If some of the savages had had Nokia phones, I wouldn't have blinked.
Also, and this is not a trivial point, this is a godless movie as well as a soulless one. I don't have a problem with treating the Old Testament as fiction instead of a holy book; I had to do it in college and it's worth the exercise. But Aronofsky would've failed the assignment because he manages to miss the point of the tale -- it's a sci-fi story he's telling, not an origin story. There is no god or God, there is a Creator who might as well be a distant king or Elsa from Frozen. You don't have to believe in the god of the story, but you can't turn him into something else. You can't keep the miracles and lose the divinity and still say you're telling the same tale, especially this tale because there is no flood, let alone no ark, without a divine power making it happen. In the actual Bible story, Noah is chosen for a reason and his faith is both tested and rewarded. There is no faith here, no sense of belief in anything. Noah's family seems to have no part in his religion, which he is never seen practicing the rituals of, and they ascribe to him total authority over life and death without any room for a higher power. As does the movie because it is Noah, not God, who is responsible for the deaths of the everyone, never more so than the girl his son is trying to protect,who is hobbled by a steel bear trap(!?!) and is thrown by Noah underfoot of a mob. When Noah tells his family of the first days of creation, the visuals are of evolution; the blessings of the birthright are now magic passed on through a ritual wherein the shed skin of the serpent of the Garden of Eden (a visual that made the audience giggle five seconds into the film) serves as phylacteries and the blessing cannot take place without it -- as if the power of the blessing came from the shed skin and not God. It's not about credence or atheism; it's about respecting the story and that's not here.
But, in the end, it's long and boring and stupid and comically bad and has too much CGI and too many raging actors, so it's not worth getting upset about it.
Turns out I needed to slip out before the Q-and-A because my only question to the director would have been "Were you drunk?"
This movie is terrible. Really, really terrible. And not in the enjoyable Bad Movie way. Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of my all-time favorite flicks; I enjoy a good B movie. This is not a good B movie. This is a movie with an A-list cast, an A-list director, and the CGI budget of Avatar that somehow turned out to be what would happen if Tommy Wiseau decided to rewrite the screenplays of the Lord of the Rings movies after falling asleep watching Waterworld.
There are stone Ents, who are really fallen angels, but they're totally Ents and watching their endless subplot and fight scenes makes the Entwash look like the best rave ever.
And Anthony Hopkins is wearing Gollum's hairpiece and spends all of his screen time crouched down and muttering about his precious (red berries).
I didn't have high hopes for the movie, but I figured it might at least be the less ridiculous biblical epic than Exodus: Gods and Kings. And then ten seconds into the movie, the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden turns out to be shaped like a human heart and starts pulsating. So I quickly switched gears to hoping it would at least be quality cheese, but it's not. It's actually boring as heck for long stretches and not visually appealing at all because 85% of the movie is CGI and the entire film is done in a dark, muted, washed out palette.
The dialogue is comically bad -- stilted, predictable -- and the line readings are arguably worse considering we've seen almost everyone here do better elsewhere. Also, Logan Lerman was apparently told to watch Christian Slater in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and copy every mannerism as well as the look.
There are so many anachronisms that you'd get alcohol poisoning doing a drinking game out of them. Perfectly bored long firearms! Steel and iron weapons we watch get forged by men wearing metal welding face shields with eye slots! If some of the savages had had Nokia phones, I wouldn't have blinked.
Also, and this is not a trivial point, this is a godless movie as well as a soulless one. I don't have a problem with treating the Old Testament as fiction instead of a holy book; I had to do it in college and it's worth the exercise. But Aronofsky would've failed the assignment because he manages to miss the point of the tale -- it's a sci-fi story he's telling, not an origin story. There is no god or God, there is a Creator who might as well be a distant king or Elsa from Frozen. You don't have to believe in the god of the story, but you can't turn him into something else. You can't keep the miracles and lose the divinity and still say you're telling the same tale, especially this tale because there is no flood, let alone no ark, without a divine power making it happen. In the actual Bible story, Noah is chosen for a reason and his faith is both tested and rewarded. There is no faith here, no sense of belief in anything. Noah's family seems to have no part in his religion, which he is never seen practicing the rituals of, and they ascribe to him total authority over life and death without any room for a higher power. As does the movie because it is Noah, not God, who is responsible for the deaths of the everyone, never more so than the girl his son is trying to protect,who is hobbled by a steel bear trap(!?!) and is thrown by Noah underfoot of a mob. When Noah tells his family of the first days of creation, the visuals are of evolution; the blessings of the birthright are now magic passed on through a ritual wherein the shed skin of the serpent of the Garden of Eden (a visual that made the audience giggle five seconds into the film) serves as phylacteries and the blessing cannot take place without it -- as if the power of the blessing came from the shed skin and not God. It's not about credence or atheism; it's about respecting the story and that's not here.
But, in the end, it's long and boring and stupid and comically bad and has too much CGI and too many raging actors, so it's not worth getting upset about it.
