Review of Noah (2014) by Omid975 — 21 Sep 2014

“In the beginning there was nothing.” Says Noah when he describes the creation to his family while they are floating on the water surrounded Earth.

As I was watching Noah (2014) my mind got filled with lots of questions and yet new ideas of brilliance about the truth of what was going on in the past of humankind and of course the past of creation. From the fallen angels who disobeyed the creator to help human and therefor were punished to be transformed from light and trapped into bodies of stones until they got released asking the creator to forgive them and ascended back to the heaven, it made me realize how ungrateful human is and yet how stupid it could be. It, the movie, also solved some of my questions.

Temptation led him to eat the forbidden fruit, and descended him to the Earth, it began to kill his own kind and turned the world into a planet of horror. But after generations there comes a man of light whose task is to lead the world into a new beginning by wiping the ugliness of generation of disobeying people off the face of the Earth having them all sunk. The creator chooses him to finish what was left to be done … but soon he realizes there is a choice to let it go on with mankind life or to abort the existence of it.

Emotionally struggled between his feelings for his family and his will to do the right with the creator, Noah says to him “I will not fail you” and repeats it three times determined to end the violence brought to the Earth by man abusing the knowledge that fallen angels had given to them of creation.

There are many great scenes in the movie but for me, there was nothing more tremendous than to see the sudden bloom of a flower by a drop of rain or the sudden growth of trees from a barren land which compelled me to think about the majesty of the creator once again but this time deeper from a clearer view; there is nothing that he can’t do.

However, before the movie was over the idea that how different and perhaps diverted the story and the characters of Noah and his family members are from the original ones I had heard came to my mind. It had lots of paradoxes with what was narrated in Muslims’ Quran and although I am no familiar with the real Bible but I can say it for certain that it is in contradiction with it to. For instance the long age of Noah comes to the mind that no evidence of it could be seen in the movie. It seems that the writers (Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel) haven’t done a complete research for a project that its name proceeds the whole Cinema in history genre put together.

When I saw Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly playing together in A Beautiful Mind (2001) as a couple whose relationship was disturbed by the hallucinated imaginations of Dr. Nash (Russell Crowe), I was so amused by their realistic and amazing performance and now to see them back together again in Noah, I can’t think of any other couple of actors who could play the roles as good as they did.

The visual effects, on the other hand, are not so eye catching comparing to the previous works of Paramount Pictures like Titanic (1997). The animals could easily be found as immaturely animated and the species like the cats are hidden from the eyes in the majestic entrance of the animals into the arc. I think The Ten Commandments’ (1956) creators would be doing a better yet more realistic job of making Noah. Of course it was in no compare with Darren Aronofsky’s previous jobs like Black Swan (2010). However, to sum up nearly 2000 years of Noah’s life and capture it in a 2+ hour feature with a though diverted but a rather straight storyline without any excess inclination in it was an absolutely daring work that Darren did.