Noah

Ten generations after Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, man’s descent into wickedness continues unabated. Escaping Cain’s line and their evil ways, personified by a growly Ray Winstone and his rowdy bunch, Noah (Crowe at his craggy best) and his family (wife Connelly, sons Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Leo McHugh Carroll, and adopted daughter Watson) up sticks in search for safer lands. With the help of grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), Noah receives a vision from ‘the Creator’ how to right the wrongs of the world: he’s to build an ark to house two of every animal from an imminent flood that will wipe the planet, and the slate, clean…

It occupies a middle ground between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’: the giant rock monsters, fallen angels who help Noah build and defend the ark, are in the former camp even if they are necessary to the narrative - there would be nothing stopping Winstone’s hordes if they weren’t there but try to stop thinking about The Never Ending Story’s Rock Biter. Strangely, with Noah needing oomph elsewhere Aronofsky holds back: the wickedness of man, which drives the film, is largely absent barring one hellish sequence and, most frustratingly, the deluge itself is skipped past with the anguish of the drowning reduced to off-camera screams. A Noah film and we don’t see the wicked suffer? Hmm.

The movie is split into two – the making the ark and the flood – and while both sections experience lulls in dramatic tension the second part boasts some surprises. This latter half might be visually unexciting - a talkie set in the bowels of a giant ship - but exploring the eponymous hero’s fall into a tragic Lear figure corrupted by his beliefs is brave. With Noah feeling forced into tough decisions, there’s a moral complexity that’s largely absent from €130 million blockbusters. The second half too hosts the best bit, an evolution/creation montage that, while may spark some religious furore (along with the absence of the word ‘God’), will please Michel Gondry.

Regardless of the end result, Aronofsky has managed to deliver a biblical epic that’s neither DeMille nor Emmerich and that’s something.