Noah

It would be so, so easy. Like shoot­ing fish in a very large bar­rel. Rus­sell Crowe as a bib­li­cal patri­arch? Snork! Emma Wat­son play­ing a pre­his­toric love inter­est? Tee hee! Ray Win­stone as a men­ac­ing cock­ney war­lord with a pen­chant for leather and a seething hatred of arks? Stitch up my sides, please.

Except it isn’t fun­ny. Not even unin­ten­tion­al­ly. Not for one of Noah’s 138 min­utes is there a drop of humour, or any­thing else that much resem­bles human emo­tion, to leav­en this por­ten­tous retelling of the flood myth. In the ear­ly scenes – what in the Mar­vel Uni­verse™ would be termed The Ori­gin Sto­ry – the boy Noah lives in fear and des­ti­tu­tion amid desert scrub­land, the last descen­dent of Abel, hunt­ed by the heirs of Cain. Lat­er, he rais­es his own fam­i­ly in fear and des­ti­tu­tion. They live in a tent by an ash pit, a gen­tri­fi­ca­tion appar­ent­ly con­ferred through God’s favour.

Some­where along the way the Noahs have learned to make den­im, which they wear with the seams on the out­side, this being old­en times. It dif­fer­en­ti­ates them from the sons of Cain, who sashay across the wilder­ness in qua­si-fetish­wear Mad Max cast-offs. Home school­ing for the kids revolves around strict veg­an prin­ci­ples and Bible sto­ries, of which, this still being the Book of Gen­e­sis, there are only about three. By the time Noah has his watery anx­i­ety dream, the unremit­ting bore­dom of this mis­er­able exis­tence gives the destruc­tion of all life on Earth the glossy allure of that bit in The Wiz­ard of Oz when sepia real­i­ty is swept away in a Tech­ni­col­or explosion.

But not so fast. Before that blessed relief, Noah has to build his ark and keep it safe from Ray Win­stone, the leader of exact­ly the kind of maraud­ing, shouty types who have angered ​“the Cre­ator” (the reli­gion-neu­tral almighty) in the first place and caused Him to pull the plug on the whole busi­ness of exis­tence. It’s here, and in the even­tu­al flood scenes, that Noah comes clos­est to achiev­ing the vital­i­ty that might free it from its own ener­vat­ing earnest­ness. The arrival of the ani­mals – in vast herds of two by two – is charm­ing, even if their source is a bit of a mys­tery. Did they come from the desert or the ash pit? Or the vast plain of life­less vol­canic rock? Whichev­er, their warm CGI pres­ence is the clos­est thing to life in the entire film.

Real death, on the oth­er hand, there is plen­ty of: the mil­lions con­demned to die who, in dis­as­ter movie boil­er­plate, turn on one anoth­er long before nature takes its course. It’s impos­si­ble not to feel a gen­uine­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic shiv­er when, as Noah’s fam­i­ly eat their rub­bish food inside the ark, the screams of the drown­ing rise above the howl­ing storm and we’re grant­ed a glimpse of the last of human­i­ty, cling­ing to the high­est peaks, wave-lashed and plead­ing for life.

This is Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa smashed into the worst weath­er in Pacif­ic Rim, and a hint of what a spec­tac­u­lar missed oppor­tu­ni­ty Aronofsky’s pic­ture is. Nei­ther the ludi­crous The Shin­ing-at-sea plot that fol­lows nor the schmaltzy end­ing can lessen that scene’s pow­er, but it alone can’t save a film so mired in its own self-impor­tance that it achieves the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble task of mak­ing the end of the world very, very boring.

What’s equal­ly curi­ous about Noah, giv­en its source, is how shy it is of reli­gion. That’s not to say that bible movies have to adhere to the orig­i­nal sto­ries — the great­est of all, Mar­tin Scorsese’s The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, reviv­i­fied the emo­tion­al pow­er of a famil­iar tale pre­cise­ly by deal­ing with all the things that didn’t hap­pen in the Bible. But here God, as a char­ac­ter, is pret­ty much absent.

Noah has dreams, he ​“sees” signs oth­ers fail to recog­nise, but there is no divine pres­ence (at least not that Charl­ton Hes­ton would recog­nise), and that cre­ates a deep prob­lem in terms of empa­thy with Rus­sell Crowe’s flint-eyed sur­vival­ist. Because, with­out the moral con­text set out explic­it­ly in the orig­i­nal sto­ry, Noah is sim­ply a man who believes him­self deserv­ing of life and all oth­ers deserv­ing of death – a psy­chopath, in fact.

His moral cer­tain­ty, lat­er vin­di­cat­ed, has all the hall­marks of mad­ness, which at best makes this a Mos­qui­to Coast for the Rap­ture set and, at worst, a play­book for fans heav­i­ly for­ti­fied com­pounds every­where – that is, if they can sit through Noah to the end, they prob­a­bly deserve to inher­it the earth anyway.