Verdict:
The first and main issue is perhaps not with the movie itself, but it nonetheless inevitably affects the film due to the subject material it chose to deal with. This issue is the “better than though” attitude of Noah and his family. Noah and his wife speak several times about them being the chosen ones. They are special and others are not. Others, the ones living in the cities are wicked and are going to be destroyed but they, the ones living in the dirt, are the chosen ones of course. Kudos to the film for not hiding from this religiously accurate attitude, but it does present a bit of a problem.
The problem is that the movie (and the Book of Genisis, from where the story came) seems to want you to root for Noah and his family. This is evident because the bad king of men is shown to be a murderer, and also at one point he says that he’ll take what he wants, showing that he is arrogant and selfish, so you know that guy is the pure antagonist. But beyond that forced villainy, his motivations throughout the rest of the film are completely justifiable and he is generally just trying to save his people. Meanwhile, his subjects are shown as debauched through the way they treat their weak ones, but this means that there are weak and more innocent people in their midst, whom God apparently deems to be collateral damage in his great plan.
In short, I did not know whom to root for because the protagonists and their God were kind of unlikable.
The realistic portrayal of God’s message was nice. His message comes to Noah through dreams that Noah then interprets himself. This creates interesting tension within the family, because the family is left to wonder if Noah really hears God or if he is just a religious fanatic who lost his mind (and this would’ve made for an interesting exploration of faith). However, the movie then undermines this realistic take by having magical stone angels, fire swords and the eventual super-flood instead of a more realistic heavy storm it could have chosen instead.
Noah is not Gladiator’s best performance. He is a little bland, always either stoic or angry, with half his face obscured by the beard towards the 2nd half of the movie. But the movie does have Anthony Hopkins and Ray Winstone in it, both of whom were great when they came on screen. Especially, Ray as the villain was memorable.
However, the biggest sin this movie commits is that it is neither very impressive nor memorable. Here you have a world-wide flood, a disaster of biblical proportions, literally. The story of the flood exists in almost every culture. It is so primal and epic. So where is the anger, the struggle, the scale, the raining for 40 days and 40 nights? This should have been the father of all disaster movies. Instead, it’s just this passive-aggressive family, a group of some angry locals, and some CGI stone giants.
Whatever your opinion is of Christianity, the one thing you cannot call it is insignificant or unimpressive. But this movie absolutely is just that. Even the journalists have been rather quiet about it. Considering how the subject matter is handled, you’d expect Christian protests in the streets. All you got, were a few angry comments on Fox news.
It’s not a bad film. I didn’t find anything wrong with the cinematography. The story doesn’t have anything crazy or illogical in it; it’s just the story you already know being given a bit of spice to make it long enough to fill a movie. The villain is interesting; the special effects are OK; the sound design is OK; everything’s just OK. Will you still remember Noah a month after seeing it, is another question. It ends up on the pile of all the other average flicks like Need for Speed. The disappointment is more with Noah not being the movie it could and should have been rather than with the movie it is.
It is a weird mishmash of realism and Lord of The Rings level fantasy. It would have been respected more if it went either all the way in one or in the other direction.