Noah (12A)

Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Picturehouse at FACT, Liverpool
From 4th April 2014

Reviewed by Minnie Stacey and Casey
– ARCh Critics

FROM BIBLICAL TO BABBLE: WILL NOAH SELL OUT OR BE A MAMMOTH FLOP AT ARK-SHUN?

Another film from Black Swan Darren Aronofsky director’s stool, so it must be beastly. Hope the animals don’t go in two buy-two-get-one-free. With so many American movies awash with being up themselves, Noah will not be a Shakespeare comic arcadia but up the creek without an oar to paddle: “a noah, a noah, my kingdom for a noah...” And don’t be expecting any Tom Stoppard Arcadia type dialogue either.

Bar trailers, we’ve written this review without having seen a film which must surely be arcanely banal. This likely MKUltra to encourage end-timers opened as an American box office number 1, an instant mash amassing $44 million. How can it be anything but godawful? Bible-Belt America won’t be saying Ah-No!

Casey and I were in stitches at the thought of seeing a stinker like this. Imagine the opening credits rolling to the Beatles’ ‘He’s A Real Noah Man/sitting in his Noah land’ - at which point people will be laughing so much they’ll be floating out of the picture house on floods of tears. Unless they’re folksy.

I’ve seen tweets like ‘Noah, the least film I’d ever want to see’. Plus comments such as ‘silly stuff from a silly book’ and ‘NNNOOOOOOOOoooooooooooaaahhh!!!’

Palaeontologists may have stated it’s arkademic those animals would fit into something the size of Ark Royal. Creation Ministries International tell us the Ark’s volume was 43,500 cubic metres or 1.54 million cubic feet but that if you stack up this equivalent of 522 standard American railroad stock cars - no problem there’s plenny of room! Noah limiting the archaic intake to kinds of animals is the creative creationist explanation.

That’s arky-illogy for you - elephantine with sea sickness. Experts say the absolute limit in length for a wooden ship is 300 feet and even then it was liable to `hogging' and `sagging’. Devilish details. No doubt Noah would think people who complained about his shipbuilding (up the workers – betcha they don’t board!) are just ark-re-moany-us. Did god blame Noah’s ark-re-moany on climate change? Noah was just another floodite but do we really want to watch scarily boring torrential rain, the same-old-same-old we in Britain have been deluged by?

As this living daylights of zoo-poo didn’t go the way of Ark Royal when it was being pitched, Noah’s producers have opened critical floodgates. Did anyone ask Docker No if he’d checked whether the animals were gay? Russell had a meeting with Archbishop Justin Welby and reportedly hopes the movie will provoke ‘chats’.

In what plainly is an old waves tale, I’ve heard that women are there just to wail. Is Anthony Hopkins’ role to silence any strictly forbidden pre-disembarkation coupling-up leading to lambing? Is Ray Winstone’s presence gangsta movie confirmation? And for the gosh of dosh - Harry Potter’s girlfriend’s in it!

Most people will find Noah ark-some, it’s come to rain on our parade. The Liverpool version would be called ‘Ark-id’. Anarchism it is not.

To paraphrase Genesis 6:19–20, it must be a full-on creepy thing. Save us from this righteous puppet of a muppet god! A capitalist farmer hiring zero-hour slaves to build a burgher-barge is terrifyingly believable! Bring back Archimedes’ way with water…. or we’re all screwed!

To read Colin Serjent's review of Noah click here

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