NOAH

I just saw NOAH! Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky, tells the classic story of how Noah, the last son of Seth, built an arc under orders from God, to protect all righteous creation from a massive flood meant to wipe out the evils of mankind. Now, this movie really has me torn because there's a lot in it that I liked and there's a lot in it that I didn't like.

On the plus side, the performances here are truly astounding, especially Russel Crowe who gives us one more reason why he is one of the best actors in the world. The dialogue is beautifully written and the sets and the makeup are excellent in that, unlike a lot if other medieval style films in recent memory, they really help to sell the difficulty of life back in those days. There's also a sequence that, in my eyes, puts to bed the feud between science and creationism in a big "you're both right" moment that I think is worth at least $2 of the $10 admission price.

Now we come to the other side of the coin. I would LOVE to give a rundown of everything wrong about this movie but in the interest of brevity and remaining spoiler free, I'll suffice to say that along with some sketchy (no lie)stop motion animation and iffy special effects, it takes A LOT of liberties with it's source material. To a degree I understand why, Noah is a relatively short story and you have to pad it out a little to make a movie here but when you find yourself saying, "wait...WHAT?" every 5-minutes and notice them ignoring well established segments of the story for the sake of jazzing it up, there's a problem. Some might say, "eh, the story is unbelievable anyway, who cares if they embellish it a little bit." Well, to them I say, what if I were to re-do Lord of the Rings with Frodo as a part of a 7-man mining team led by the man sized Dikini swordsman Madmartigan, and instead of one ring there were 5 and when their powers combined they made Captain Planet? Now that may be a fun movie but the Tolkien fans would be up in arms because its a betrayal of the source material. The reason it upset me is the same reason why others were so upset about Michael Bay's plans for Ninja Turtles and the same reason why Brandon Routh will never play Superman again. So as much as I like about Noah, it ultimately commits the sin of so egregiously betraying it's source material that the point of the story gets lost which, in this case, is just not forgivable. Noah gets a 2...out of 5.