A Bold Disaster Film: ‘Noah’ Is Both Intelligent and Epic Entertainment

I did my share of Bible-reading when I was a kid. In fact, I read it multiple times from cover to cover.

I was also reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy and a bunch of Stephen King books—and of all the literature I read as an impressionable youth, nothing was more violent and more insane than the Bible. Actually, the Bible may be the sickest book ever written when it comes to death and destruction. If you count the apocalypse, the whole world dies more than once in that particular piece of literature. That’s a huge body count!

Whether you are religious or not, the Bible is, no doubt, a pretty sweet platform for over-the-top cinema. With Noah, director Darren Aronofsky has concocted a crazy, dark and nasty disaster film befitting those few pages in the book of Genesis.

In what is surely his best performance to date, Russell Crowe plays the title character, a good, passionate man in a not-particularly-good time. The people outside of Noah’s family circle have turned Earth into a place of carnivorous debauchery, and “The Creator” (this film’s go-to name for God) intends to wipe all humanity off the face of the Earth with a great flood. Noah is tasked with saving the innocent animals on a huge ship that he is to build, with the help of large rock monsters.

That’s right—I said large rock monsters. This movie has rock monsters in it. They are Aronofsky’s version of fallen angels. I don’t remember reading about rock monsters in the Bible, but I will tell you that they come in quite handy when one is tasked with building a huge boat to house two of every animal on the planet. (That’s minus the sea-faring animals, of course. There were no aquariums on the ark. Dolphins and angelfish and whatnot probably just camped out under the stormy surface, while the sharks went to town on people clinging to mountain peaks and treetops in the rising waters. Sharks eating the biblically doomed as they scampered atop Mount Everest are not depicted in this film, but I reckon “Shark-Flood-Oh” could be coming soon to a cable channel near you.)

The supporting cast includes Jennifer Connelly as Noah’s wife; Emma Watson as his adopted daughter; and Anthony Hopkins as the Yoda-like, mountain-dwelling grandfather. Logan Lerman delivers notably good work as Ham, the son of Noah who eventually gets banished for seeing his dad all drunk and naked.

The movie, as a spectacle, is quite good, although its CGI does have a few moments of weakness. The flood itself is a frightening sequence, with a horrifying moment involving screaming people outside of the ark getting washed off a big rock by waves. I’m actually surprised this movie garnered a PG-13 rating. It struck me, very much, as an R-rated film due to its violence.

Noah is also a beautiful, inspiring story about survival, freewill, blind faith, killing in the name of religion and, above all, the virtues of veganism. It comes as no surprise that Aronofsky, who also co-wrote the script, is a vegan. It also comes as no surprise that the film’s main villain (Ray Winstone) bites the heads off of live animals for evil energy.

Yes, I had a blast with this movie. I imagine it will enrage a few pastors and preachers who bring their Sunday-school classes to a matinee, only to discover the rock monsters.

Noah is not a deeply religious film; it’s a big, bold disaster movie with a super-intelligent and compassionate core. Like the best of movies, it will inspire many long, perhaps fiery conversations for years to come.

Noah is playing at theaters across the valley.