Film Carew: Noah

God said to Noah, there's gonna be a floody floody. Rain came down, it started to get muddy muddy. Get those terrible-looking CGI animals onto the arky arky.

As the most famous - implausible, logic-defying, narrative-gap-riddled - story in the bible, the yarn o' Noah's ark will be remade and retooled and re-envisioned far into cinema's future. What blockbuster-dreaming, epic-mounting, cinematic maximalist can deny the vastness of its canvas: its chosen-one narrative spur; its epic, planetary-level destruction; the fact that its narrative of creationism allows the 'visionary' filmmaker to indulge in his own artistic version of playing-God? Darren Aronofsky is sometimes thought of as an auteur (because, I guess, Pi was in black-and-white), but, from Requiem For A Dream to Black Swan, the filmmaker's favoured tenor is hysteria. And no storytelling is more hysterical than the bible.

Quite possibly plotting The Bling Ring: Noah's Ark.

Aronofsky's Noah gets blockbustery from the beginning: Cain not just slaying his bro in the Bible 101 opening reel, but begetting industrial cities of antennas and oil-derricks and robotic monsters, which spread out all over the globe(!), turning the once-paradise of habitable terrain into the blackened, volcanic wastelands of Iceland. Away from Cain's descendants, though, lives Rusty Rabbitoh, a noble man with noble fam. They're stewards of the Earth, a pack of veritable hippies: Kiwi Russ's got a beard and long-hair, he's a vegetarian (strength comes not from eating animals, but from 'the creator'), his clothes look kinda hempy, and no sooner has he had one nightmare than he's backpacking(!) across the countryside with sandal-wearin' bride and unwashed kids in tow, ready to drop some psychedelic tea on the top of a Holy Mountain.

Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel see their vision of Noah as an environmental parable, and a particularly contemporary one: man's dominion over nature having been an abject failure; the vice and avarice - the wickedness - of the naked-ape having pushed the planet to the brink. No one actually says the word 'climate', and certainly not in concert with 'change', but there's audaciousness to this somewhat secular reading of a tale of creationism. This holds in what're far-and-away Noah's best moments: psychedelic time-lapse sequences that show, first, a river forging a path to the sea, and then the book of Genesis as an act of evolution; God's breath a big bang from which life evolved; a salamander hauling itself from the primordial ooze in the blink of a jittery eye. When Aronofsky keeps things ecological - viewing creation on both micro or macro levels; from the fertility of soils to the planet as viewed from deep space (or upon Godly high) - the film has an undeniable sense of spirit. (It also has incredibly beautiful closing credits; no white-crawl-on-black-screen, but all hand-painted lettering laid out in sheafs, with Patti Smith singing a mournful dirge over scrapes of Kronos Quartet strings.)

But where Noah fails - and fails wildly, disastrously, epically; on beyond The Fountain - is in, y'know, everything that isn't these moments. Which is a problem, given it takes 70 minutes for it just to start raining. There's the general idiocy of the premise, for starters: a boat big enough to hold the taxonomy of all creation; millions of animals in some inexplicable deep-sleep, all chowin' together all friendly. Once the CGI birds and bees(!) start flying in and roosting on the under-construction arc, logic (not to mention good storytelling) flies out the window. Then there are these six-armed CGI rock-monsters (and/or angels) voiced by grand old gravelly-throat'd men-of-cinema (Nick Nolte! Frank Langella!), seemingly on loan from Lord Of The Rings and tailor-made for the obligatory battle-scenes(!) in which scary Ray Winstone and vast armies of anonymous men run at the arc whilst yelling.

So The Bible was specifically written for these guys, yeah?

Winstone eventually sneaks his way on board, bloodthirsty stowaway cum the devil incarnate, whispering sweet wicked nothings into the ear of mopey, rebellious teen Logan Lerman. He's envious of the fact that his pretty-as-a-picture elder bro Douglas Booth gets to bone Emma Watson, whilst he's looking at an eternity in the New World kept company solely by his hand. It should also be noted that Lerman's character is named Ham, and this is never not funny. Though it's also positively-delightful when the wonderfully-freckled Watson, in her oh-so-sweet toffee-accent, cavorts through a forest calling out Ham! Ham! As brooding virginal adolescent, Ham is wracked with masculine insecurities, and someone - pops, mother, brother, scary Ray Winstone - is always yelling at him to 'be a man.' Manhood, in Ham's kinda-Ancient-Greek estimation of things, being to attempt to kill your dad.

Beneath the biblical parable and environmental symbolism, Noah is a macho family drama; a tale of a disapproving dad, filled with self-appointed virtuousness and male entitlement, demanding that wife and kids do what he tells them.  Even when that's listening to the tortured screams of drowning millions and/or getting down to some good old-fashioned infanticide. In short: ol' Noah's such a deplorable dickwad that his long-suffering, peacekeeping wife (Jennifer Connelly, teeth gleaming white) warns that his kids are gonna just end up hating him. You can move to a whole new world, but you bring all that family baggage with you; and, oh, how this is the drama of boys eternal, with the very first thing Rusty does when they (spoiler alert!) return to land is hurriedly pick some grapes, so he can get drunk ASAP! It's a tale of creationism as patriarchy: human lineage traced back through a long line of bearded father figures, each of them filled with disappointment at the subsequent generations they've sired, their sons out to both live up to and stick it to the old man. Colloquially, the natural world has long been maternal; but, here, creation is all sperm, no ovum; Aronofsky's big-screen vision only reminding us that the bible was written for, by, and about men.