Holy ship! Crowe’s grumpy Noah and his dysfunctional clan help God reboot the too-wicked world in this imaginative (but hardly sacrilegious) and visually spectacular elaboration on Genesis.
While director Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan’’) isn’t above trying to goose his Scripture with a little PG-13 sex and violence, as entertainment, this epic ultimately lands roughly midway between Cecil B. DeMille’s high-camp “The Ten Commandments’’ and the high-art provocations of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.’’
If that sounds like a somewhat backhanded compliment, there’s enough good stuff to (barely) justify a three-star rating.
You know you’re not in Bible school anymore when you get a look at the film’s most impressive creation: a massive, three-tiered artisanal wooden ark that resembles a floating barge more than the traditional prowed boats featured in such past Hollywood efforts as “Noah’s Ark’’ (1928) and John Huston’s “The Bible . . . In the Beginning’’ (1966).
Somewhat more dubiously, in the Gospel according to Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel (his co-writer on “The Fountain’’), the ark is mostly constructed by fallen angels called the Watchers (Nephilim in the Good Book), giant rock creatures who amount to a biblical version of the Transformers (voiced by Frank Langella, Nick Nolte and Mark Margolis).
Younger audience members will probably appreciate this interpolation, since the animals that have figured so prominently in other versions get rather short shrift from Aronofsky — conjured up entirely on computer screens, they all stream quickly onto the ark without Noah’ s assistance and are sedated with herbs for most of the movie. (Some audience members may feel the same way.)
Huston may have provided the voice of God as well as playing the ark builder in “The Bible,’’ but in “Noah,’’ the Almighty is strictly a voice in Russell Crowe’s head that is never heard by the audience.
The stern old survivalist (500 years old when the deluge begins in the Bible, but never mind) has a lot more to worry about than the animals.
For starters, another interpolated Bible character, Tubal-Cain (a nasty descendant of you-know-who, well-played by Ray Winstone) is leading an army trying to hijack the ark to survive the coming apocalypse.
Ham (Logan Lerman), the middle child of Noah’s three sons, is pissed off that Pop won’t let him take a bride on the ark. And speaking of ham, Noah’s grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), sets up a climactic crisis by performing what amounts to in vitro fertilization on Ila (Emma Watson), a formerly barren orphan raised by Noah.
As she and Noah’s eldest son (Douglas Booth, whose beard makes him look astonishingly like a Williamsburg hipster) are an item, this may imperil what Noah takes as a divine mandate for absolute zero population growth for humans after the flood.
Because of awkward pacing, these waterlogged dramatic moments sometimes drag to the point where the overlong movie threatens to run for what feels like 40 days and nights.
While he doesn’t quite measure up to the charm and authority of Charlton Heston’s Moses, Noah is probably the best performance Crowe has given in recent years — thankfully, he isn’t singin’ in the rain, a la “Les Misérables’’ — and it’s nice to see him reteamed with “Beautiful Mind’’ co-star Jennifer Connelly (who suffers nobly as Noah’s wife) in something less cheesy than last month’s mercifully forgotten “Winter’s Tale.’’
The massive torrent of water from above (and from springs below) that wipes out the rest of mankind is worth the price of admission — at least for connoisseurs of computer-generated images — though American audiences will apparently have to wait till “Noah’’ hits Blu-ray to see the deluxe 3-D version being shown in other countries.