Noah

Darren Aaronofsky made the film π. It was small, incomprehensible in parts, and deeply bizarre, assuming a techno-magical basis to Jewish mysticism. Aaronofsky's Noah is like that, only huge.

The film describes the antediluvian civilisation of the descendants of Cain as a vast, world-spanning technological empire based on the exploitation of 'zohar', a mystical stone holding a spark of divine power. Having corrupted and destroyed both Creation and the Watchers, fallen angels who once tried to help them, men have proven unworthy and the Creator decides to wipe them out.

It is to the line of Seth that God entrusts the saving of the innocent; the creatures that have never fallen from the grace of the Garden. Aided by the surviving Watchers, Noah and his sons create the Ark, and place two of every animal in a drugged stupor to ride out the coming flood.

Antagonism is provided by Tubal-Cain, last king of the people of Cain, and by the clash of Noah's conviction that all men must die and his family's hope to begin anew in the new world.

The film is a weird mashup of Biblical narrative and pseuod-divine science fiction, and there is a weird inconsistency that comes from not really cleaving to one in preference to the other. Overall, it is an interesting film, with some fantastic cinematography and production design married to decent performances from a strong cast. The palette of the film is predominantly grey and brown, which can be a bit wearying on the eye, but in that palette the design is sumptuous, and the exceptions are striking for their contrast. On occasions, the actors are shot purely in silhouette against a vivid sky, while the green land where the Creator (never God, at least not from the descendants of Seth) still has some sway stands out starkly against the barrens of the Cainites.