RUSSELL CROWE AND RAY WINSTONE IN NOAH

A deluge of CGI: Crowe and Winstone eyeball-to-eyeball

Darren Aronofsky's new movie Noah is a fantasy based on the Old Testament story of Noah and the Flood with strange alterations, but also lines and characters and events direct from the Bible. It isn't exactly a great movie but it's thought-provoking and at times bracingly weird. It's highly watchable and has some good acting (and some not so good). It's got expensive CGI providing teeming mobs, torrential rains and surging sea and six-armed thingies. Maybe, as has been said about the French audience at Cannes after the director's Requiem for a Dream was shown, you'll stand up and applaud when you see it, and be glad you'll never have to see it again.

There are film ideas here that make you think of Eisenstein and Bergman. And you wish Eisenstein or Bergman had been around to make the movie instead of Aronofsky. In his striving for epic grandeur and memorable style, the director makes an impression, but he falls short. Noah, despite its big budget, its boldness and its oddity, is plagued by a sort of TV epic look (think "Game of Thrones" with hordes of reptiles). Its use of handheld cameras sits somewhat uneasily with its epic iMax format.

Aronofsky's four previous features go in different directions, but all have something to do with control. They show a love of extremes and, like the work of many a talented young filmmaker, wild ambition. Read Tad Friend's recent New Yorker piece about "The Making of Darren Aronofsky's 'Noah,'" and you won't be surprised to learn the director's a bit of a control freak himself, hard on actors and hard on himself. This takes us right to this film's Noah (played with authority and nary a smile by Russell Crowe). This is a man who's bent (in more ways than one) not just on following the will of God (something he's clearer on than the viewer), but of personally making sure the planet is rid not just of bad people, but, on further consideration, of all mankind, in an extreme -- if nowadays not illogical -- aim to free nature and the ecosystem to function better on their own. He's concluded, and maybe God has told him, as the New Yorker cartoons of William Steig used to say, that "People are no damn good." Noah has a monumental ego, is a sado-masochist, and is willing to slaughter his own granddaughters. Welcome to Aronofsky-land. Noah is as twisted as the protagonist of Black Swan or the tormented addicts of Requiem for a Dream.

Early events, Creation, Eden, the Fall, Cain and Abel, are visually striking moments, but not altogether integral with the Flood and Noah's cruel mission. Aronofsky and his co-writer, Ari Handel, haven't worked out a satisfying grand design. How did this Ark thing work? Noah & Co. seem to just let a great miscellaneous crowd of animals crush into it, and then spread around smoke that puts them all to sleep till the flood's over (they hope, anyway). Friend in the New Yorker article says this avoids seeming to be pro-zoo or dwelling on animal adorableness. (But hey, can you be Biblical and politically correct at the same time?) Actually, it's a clue that Aronofsky isn't particularly interested in the animals. He never shows us a noble parade of the pairs of them such as we get in conventional depictions of this theme. How would you repopulate a species through just one pair? Through incest? This puzzles us also when Noah announces his kids aren't going to be allowed to have kids. Supposing they did? Heavy inbreeding, like Russian shtetls, I guess.

In this issue of survival of the human species Noah's younger son Ham emerges as a tragic central character. He has no mate, and he seeks one among the people of the bad guy leader, Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), finding a young woman Ham later insists was "good," whom Noah forces him to leave behind. The sci-fi theme of the pain of being a lone survivor emerges plangently for a moment at least here, and as Ham, Logan Lerman, who showed promise in 3:10 to Yuma and astonishing talent in The Perks of Being a Wildflower, holds the screen powerfully here. As grandaddy Methuselah (hey, that's pretty old!), Anthony Hopkins is all too predictably charming in his homespun (fashion choices are difficult in a movie like this). In all the tumult and with those peculiar Biblical names it's frankly hard to keep track of a lot of the other characters. Jennifer Connelly as Noah's wife is, well, Jennifer Connelly-ish, and has to cry a lot, as she should, with what's going on.

This leaves us with Ray Winstone and the Watchers. Ray has always been a great gangster, not just cute as Tad Friend says, but sometimes evil and slimy to the Nth degree. He's a distinctive character actor who's wasted here playing a role that telegraphs what it is too crudely, never allowing him simply to be as he so well and interestingly can. Tubal-cain advocates bad things like killing -- and, get this: eating meat! It seems Noah and his clan are vegetarians. Could Aronofsky and Handel be pushing one too many agendas here? As for the Watchers they are monsters or giants who aid Noah. They not only do a lot of the construction work on the Ark, but kill all Tubal-cain's people when they try to storm their way on.

All this fighting goes with doing a big budget Hollywood movie, and so does the CGI. There's no way around it. And with fighting and fantasy and CGI and money, you get monsters. Aronofsky (Friend tells us) didn't want them to look like Aliens, but six arms or not, stone and dirt coating or not, they look a lot like Transformers critters. Some day people will look back on CGI and see that it made a lot of things look alike from movie to movie.

This was Aronofsky's attempt, Friend also tells us, to emerge from the arthouse and become a mainstream visionary joining forces with Paul Thomas Anderson, Quantin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher and "to show a Spielbergian touch with an epic." That hasn't happened. More mainstream this certainly is. But given that Black Swan was a surprise box office hit, was such a shift needed? It's hard to find the visionary. The whole look ultimately is less distinctive than before. Aronofsky seems a bit lost in this Biblical epic with all its turmoil, violence, dampness, and sheer mess. Setting Crowe and Winstone eyeball to eyeball and staging all this fighting to get on the Ark may be de rigeur for such a flick, but it simply cheapens and makes generic one of the great human stories.

At least Aronofsky won one battle, though. While the studio tried multiple more "Christian-friendly" shorter cuts of the movie, the director's cut played better when test audiences and so it is the one we get to watch.

Noah, 128 mins., opened in US theaters 28 March 2014. Screened for this review in the iMax theater of the AMC Bay Street 16 in Emeryville, California.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.