After films like Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky shot his biggest blockbuster to date with Noah. There has rarely been a Bible film like this one, because the director created the Mix of religious material and free fantasy elements adapted a graphic novel he helped develop.
The result is an intriguingly quirky combination of a mass-market blockbuster and an intimate, quirky art-house psychological thriller. The film stars Russell Crowe and Emma Watson now available to stream on subscription to Disney+* and definitely worth a look.
Fantasy blockbuster Noah deals critically and profoundly with Bible material
The film’s story takes up the well-known story from the Bible in which Noah (Russell Crowe) Visions of a great flood has that will bring the end of mankind. He sees himself as the chosen one who should save his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), his sons Ham (Logan Lerman) and Shem (Douglas Booth) and their friend Ila (Emma Watson) on an ark together with two specimens of the animal world.
In Noah, Aronofsky forms the biblical material into a mixture of oppressive fantasy catastrophe spectacle and ultra dark, psychotic character drama. The director combines epic visuals, fantasy elements like the Transformers-esque Stone Guardians, and surreal nightmare visions of the main character into an idiosyncratic viewing experience that’s just as challenging as portraying Noah himself.
Although he is initially a kind of popular figure, he goes through incredible changes over the course of the story. When Noah becomes an oppressive chamber play on the high seas in the last third, in which Emma Watson’s character not only has to fight against the great apocalyptic catastrophe, Crowe’s Noah almost turns out to be cold-blooded maniac driven by questionable motives.
This unraveling atmosphere with different narrative directions and character facets makes Noah an intriguing blockbuster experiment that’s best left to your own opinion. In any case, Darren Aronofsky’s work doesn’t have much in common with the well-known bible adaptations that often seem outdated by now.
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