Noah Has Adaptation Issues When Bringing The Inventive And Allegorical Graphic Novel To Screen....
Noah (2014)
I've loved every single film Darren Aronofsky has ever made, so naturally I was extremely excited to see Aronofsky's sixth film. The decision to make a big budget movie about Noah seemed rather strange, but that just made it more interested to see what Aronofsky would do with the concept.
Perhaps it was so quick that I missed it, but the UK version of the film seemed to be missing the production company's disclaimer about how much they respect people who are strict believers in the original Bible story. While I can see why Bible literalists might be upset about the movie considering that they seem to get upset over everything, I think that, if anything, this movie stayed too true to the source material. There are a few points where it seems to hold true to the source material to a greater extent than the graphic novel.
Unlike in the case of "The Fountain", I read the graphic novel before seeing the movie this time. And I have to say, I loved the graphic novel. I was very excited to see it play out on the big screen. But I was surprised to see which elements had been changed.
I feel that Noah doesn't have the same emotional force as Aronofsky's other movies and I think part of that is because it has a lower age certificate than any of his other films. This is the first Aronofsky film to have a "12A" certificate (as opposed to "15" or "18"). For those not familiar with the UK ratings system, there used to be a rating "12" meaning that you had to be 12 or above to watch it, but that was changed to "12A" so that 8 year olds could see Lord Of The Rings films if accompanied by an adult. As a result, some of the more shocking elements have been toned down and the emotional impact is lost in some places.
(Just to confirm, the American certificates for Aronofsky's films have all been an R rating, asides from Requiem For A Dream which was initially rated NC-17. There was an edited PG-13 rated version of "The Fountain", but the uncut version was rated R too.)
It seems bizarre that they would make the decision to appeal to a younger age group when dealing with a story of the destruction of the human race. And admittedly even with the unfortunate concessions, this still seems like a story way too shocking to expose young children to.
I don't include spoilers in my reviews, so I'll do a spoiler-filled post after this so I can go into full details on the changes between the graphic novel and the film. But a major difference comes in right at the start. There are some annoying points where while the film tells us with dialogue what the graphic novel told with imagery. The graphic novel begins with a very simple set of images indicating the Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel stories:
The movie, however, spends the whole initial section of the film explaining the earlier parts of the book of Genesis in the Bible with unfortunate silly-looking yellow lettering.
We also get a premature explanation of the 'watchers' explaining how they built 'evil cities' as well as an scene involving the murder of Noah's father. Neither of these are in the graphic novel. The murder of Noah's father is the beginning of a rather bizarre notion in the film that, asides from Noah's family, the entire world consists in descendants of Cain. This felt too bizarre to me. Noah is apparently 8 generations after Seth (the youngest brother after Cain and Abel), so there inevitably has to be a fairly sizeable extended family of people who were also descended from Seth who are going to die in the flood. But nevertheless it is strongly implied that Noah, his children and his grandfather Methusalah, are the only ones descended from Seth after all those years. It actually felt a little cheap to me to make it seem like all the victims of the flood were part of an evil family.
Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly seem miscast. I'm not going to say that either of them are bad actors and I have to put some of the blame for their flat performances on the director (as much as I respect him for prior work). Still, I don't think they could have pulled off what was achieved by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in "The Fountain" - and I felt this movie desperately needed that quality of emotional expression. Crowe never seemed to feel sympathetic enough, even towards the beginning of the film, while by the end of the film Connelly's distraught expressions just felt like nails on a chalkboard to me.
And please stop hiring Logan Lerman please? He was bland in "Perks of Being a Wallflower" and he's bland here. Let him get on with being Percy Jackson and stop giving him roles in serious movies.
On the other hand, I am very impressed with what has been done with the watchers in the movie. Their nature has been made even clearer by having them trapped in the rocks of the Earth with their true nature of light shining out from within their awkward rock-encrusted shape. This was very visually impressive and I liked how there was something akin to "The Dark Crystal" in these characters. That being said, I felt the actual performances of the watchers made too little of an impact. The watchers didn't seem imposing or scary enough considering the level of threat they are meant to pose.
The most impressive performance of all was definitely Ray Winstone as the villain Tubal-Cain. I felt that Winstone managed to bring real depth to a character that, in the original graphic novel, is a fairly one-sided villain. It is clearly recognised that Tubal-Cain is no less a true believer than Noah, but he has a sense of arrogance and entitlement which Noah lacks. While Noah recognises his role as a prophet is a huge responsibility and a burden, Tubal-Cain envies that role, clearly frustrated that he receives no visions from the creator. He regularly emphasises that he is made in God's image, seeing it as a sign of his supriority over the animal kingdom.
The ending goes on way too long and the decision to include the whole "walking backwards with a sheet" thing from the Bible was a waste of time. With all that time spent with people talking to each other after all the action is over, it's no wonder there are people comparing this to Lord of the Rings.
A lot of elements of the graphic novel are still present and there are some very visually impressive elements in the Noah movie too. However, the emotional force that is normally heartbreaking in Aronofsky's films felt misjudged here. The characters felt bland and the scenario failed to pull me in. This is the first Aronofsky film that I have really disliked and I hope this will prove to be an unfortunate one-off. In the end, I suppose my issue is that this is not a successful adaptation of Aronofsky and Hendel's graphic novel. This is odd, since I thought a successful adaptation was inevitable with Aronofsky in the director's chair.
D+