My report on the new movie Noah - hopefully this will help your own decisions. THE THEATER EXPERIENCE: The theater Im familiar with had quite a few more people than usual. It seemed to me the audience was a bit skewed toward empty nesters ...and some of those hadnt been inside a theater in quite a while. During the film attention was rapt. No visits to the restrooms (except me:-), no popcorn runs, no stage whispers, no little kid voices querying their parents what just happened?, no telltale glows indicating folks surreptitiously checking the messages on their smartphones. But as soon as the end credits came on, everyone stood up and left. Nobody kept sitting there in stunned silence, and there were no knots of excited conversation in the theater lobby. MY OWN REACTIONS: As expected it was an epic story. The music, all the serious conversations, and the dramatic visuals dont let you forget its weighty. There is indeed an unmistakable environmental message, reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring except stronger (yet not overpowering), with mining being a proxy indicator for industrial civilization run amok. The film is relatively long, but not overlong. The pacing is neither so fast its hard to follow, nor so slow its boring. Based on early reviews, I expected the story to be a freeform riff inspired by the Biblical story. Not so much it turned out. Yes the spin and the drama were added to the flat Biblical narrative, and there was a fair bit of poetic license. Yes barebones and vague hints in the Biblical story were considerably fleshed out as specific events. Yes a few more events were added. But overall it felt like the story tried pretty hard to exactly hit every single plot point from the Biblical story. Also based on earlier information, I expected all the full-screen CGI to be excellent - after all, we can now see great CGI of gizmos in action movies (Transformers), and great CGI of hyper-realistic fantasy (Life of Pi), and this is a big budget production. Indeed single items (flower blooms, vegetation, waves) were excellent, as was the screen any time it was full of stuff (chases and battles, massed animals, inside the ark), imaginary creatures (six-armed stone watchers), and light and flame effects (watchers returning to heaven, primitive cannon fire). But somehow the portrayal of blasted landscapes that were nearly featureless and empty still didnt feel quite right. The effects for the creation of the universe, the earth, and life, were probably quite good. But Im not a fair judge of those things; to me nothing compares favorably with the very lengthy effects in Malicks The Tree of Life.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 02:27:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015