Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Noah (2014)

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Posted by Connor Wilson (Member # 6088) on 03-31-2014, 05:29 PM:

Regal Kingstowne Stadium 16, Alexandria, VA
March 31st, 12:30pm show
Theater #1
Presented in RPX, Dolby Atmos
Issues: Tiny blue dead pixel

Let me say I am non-religious, don't know the Bible by heart, and understand the controversy surrounding the film. What I understand is, well: Imagine some Hollywood director took your favorite book and changed it to his/her liking. Literary adaptations have always took creative liberties to update it for a modern generation, this isn't new to cinema.

From what I've heard, Noah didn't have a backstory laid out in the Bible. For a motion picture being driven by character, non-canonical material had to be made to flesh it out for a two-hour film. Add in to the mix with rock Transformers and the underlying environmentalist message.

"Man is evil, pollutes the Earth, therefore they will perish" is rather an extreme theory even for environmentalism. No wonder most of the humans in this film are spiteful and tyrannical. The more religio-political content the more detracted I am from the film. What really confused me was that

Spoiler Alert - Click to Toggle
Noah starts out as an environmentalist, then a megalomaniac committing infanticide, then a nice guy at the end. These changes happen so abruptly that there is no gradual transition. At this point, the direction was merely attempting to manipulate the emotions of a casual viewer with such extremes.

The film is certainly beautiful to look at, with delicious scenery and colors. It is also fantastic in Dolby Atmos, with a tremendous dynamic range, multilayered effects, pinpoint positioning, etc. It is not a loud or explosive film, but once the action kicks in, it really kicks in. The subtle use of Atmos delivers a richer experience than your average 5.1 or 7.1 system. It's a good tech demo, but not really a good movie.

RATING: 4 out of 10

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-31-2014, 07:16 PM:

Seems like environmentalism would be out of place in a biblical epic. I have a feeling I'm not going to like this movie -- I don't like environmentalism in movies in general. It always seems forced.

Posted by David E. Nedrow (Member # 4981) on 03-31-2014, 10:41 PM:

quote: Mike B
I don't like environmentalism in movies in general. It always seems forced.

Yeah, I generally hate when something like that is shoehorned into something that doesn't directly relate. When a film is actually about environmentalism, it's fine - ref. SILENT RUNNING .

I haven't seen NOAH, and I know a lot of the "noise" about it being an environmental hit job is coming from the same people who thought HAPPY FEET was also the spawn of the devil. I'll see it when it hits the local dollar house just to see for myself.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-31-2014, 11:34 PM:

Cinema: Harkins Theatres Bricktown 16
Screen: Cine Capri
Format: 2K 2D, 1.85:1 on common height screen, Dolby Atmos
Presentation Problems: None
Rating: 2.75 stars out of 4

My girlfriend and I watched Noah this past Saturday evening after eating a pretty good dinner at Kevin Durant's new namesake restaurant in Bricktown. The movie was fairly entertaining in the conventional sense, although it dragged in a few areas -like after the flood had hit for instance.

Obviously Darren Aronofsky took some liberties with the story of Noah -like fleshing out enough of a story to fill a 2 hour movie. The biblical account of Noah is a little on the thin side. Some of the plot turns are obviously fabricated. Some of the characters are made up (like those big Transformers-like rock things called "the watchers"). Aronofsky also includes some style cues reminiscent of Requiem For a Dream. For the folks who are getting seriously butt-hurt over this movie they ought to look at the up-side. At least Hollywood is bringing some attention to this topic rather than making Lethal Weapon 10.

I didn't feel like this movie was beating me about the head, neck and chest with an overbearing environmentalism message. The way I took it was "the creator" was smiting mankind for his wickedness and hubris (rejection of the creator) rather than it merely being about industrialism spoiling the Earth. The movie does make some mention of industrialism, but to me it seemed much more like the flood was a response to evil.

Regarding the 1.85:1 ratio, it's difficult to tell why Aronofsky chose to shoot the movie flat. His previous two movies (Black Swan and The Wrestler) were composed for 'scope. All his other movies varied between 1.37:1 and 1.85:1. Nevertheless, I do think the increasing number of common width screens are going to influence movie studios to release fewer 'scope movies at some point.

The Dolby Atmos mix for this movie was pretty good. It didn't pile on as many sound object panning tricks as Gravity, but it had a few good ones. In one scene a character fired something similar to a flare and it made a well defined arc-like surround pan from the screen, tracking overhead and to the left rear speakers. There was a lot of localized audio in specific areas of the surrounds, a lot more specific than the quadrants of a 7.1 system. The mix had a lot of ambient sounds that completely filled the room, but without overpowering what was happening on the screen. If I had any complaint I just wish Harkins' Cine Capri theater had more punch on the sub-bass end of things.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-02-2014, 02:03 AM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
(like those big Transformers-like rock things called "the watchers"

I haven't had a chance to look, but supposedly those things are supposed to be "fallen angels" or some sort of spiritual things and are indeed mentioned in the Bible. Although I doubt the good book refers to them as shape shifting beings of living rock.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 04-02-2014, 04:48 AM:

It was way out to Left Field - wasn't impressed. What's real bad on this one is that it can easily mislead to those who haven't read the Bible since this film no way follows scripture.

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 04-02-2014, 11:51 PM:

I kind of thought the movie on the whole was all over the place and as a result really left me a bit unimpressed.

The Atmos was good, not great... and I was really hoping I'd hear some more over the head sound effects that one review I had read was what the sound mixers had hoped to convey.

movie grade: C-
soundmix grade: B

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-03-2014, 01:44 AM:

I'm trying to decide whether we should play this over Easter week or not. On the one hand it would attract a lot of the faith community, but on the other hand it might rub a lot of them the wrong way on that particular weekend, so maybe it might be better to wait another week. Maybe I'm over-thinking it.

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 04-08-2014, 12:59 AM:

I'd love to hear what the faith community would make of the 'Watchers' - those creatures looked like they wandered off the Lord of the Ring/Hobbit film sets and stumbled into the wrong movie. [Wink]

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-08-2014, 01:26 AM:

I saw one review where they were seen as "fallen angels" and apparently there is a mention of such angels in the bible, but I haven't checked that out. But yeah, I can see where people might be shaking their heads on the way out.

Here is a paragraph from the Catholic News Services website's review of the movie which sort of explains how the Watchers loosely connect with the Bible:

quote:
A more questionable exercise of creative liberty presents us with a race of giant creatures called the Watchers. Their background story, meant to connect them to the shadowy Nephilim mentioned in Chapter 6 of Genesis, describes them as angels who voluntarily fell to Earth to help the fledgling human race. The idea of angel-like Watchers also evokes the Book of Daniel and the extra-canonical books of Enoch and Jubilees.

Posted by Terry Lynn-Stevens (Member # 7349) on 04-08-2014, 04:38 PM:

Not a bad film, Noah is the cast of Perks of Being a Wallflower meets the cast of A Beautiful Mind with the style and the music of The Fountain. I am not a big Bible fan and I barely know the story so perhaps that is why I liked it.

I don't really care if the movie is accurate to what the Bible says, the movie made me interested in knowing more about the story so I guess the movie did the job it was intended to do, at least for me that is. It appears there are a lot of articles comparing the truth to what is fictional.

The cinematography was the same guy who does all of the other movies by Aronofsky and while it was very good from an artistic point of view, I assume they could of used better cameras as the movie did not look like a modern film, it looked like an older film. I suspect that is the style that was intended as all of Aronofsky's movies look great artistically, but they lack high quality images.

The music was very similar to The Fountain, no surprise here as it was the same person who did the score of the fountain.

The sound was also awesome for this movie, it was loud and very engaging. The sound certainly helped with the impact of the movie. There was some serious bass in some scenes and it was the first movie in a long while where I could literally feel the bass while watching the movie.

My favorite character, creature or creation from the film was the watchers, I found them much more interesting than some of the creatures from Peter Jackson movies or anything from Michael Bay. I thought they were great. (I believe Nick Nolte did the voice of one of the watchers)

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 04-08-2014, 04:58 PM:

I thought the Watchers were very two-dimensional non-characters. Why would the Watchers leader go from outright hostility and dragging the other one off by the leg to "let's help this man" in ten seconds? Surely it would take more convincing than than that to get a 180 degree turnaround in attitude from those things.

One thing that has really struck me this week, though, is how absolutely dependent and uninformed many people seem to be. There was a gang of people in their 60's on the way out the door the other day and I heard one of them say, "How much of that was actually in the bible?" One of the others replied, "We'll ask the pastor."

[Confused]

If you want the facts, why in the world would you need to "ask the pastor" instead of simply reading it for yourself? It's public information and not at all hard to find. I could understand this if they were a bunch of kids, but these folks were older than I am. Is original thinking and research that outmoded?

I've never been around much that religious stuff myself, but just from personal general knowledge I'm pretty sure that I could tell you what parts of the movie originated in the bible (not very much) and what was added or moved from some other bible story, or simply invented for the movie. And I haven't done any specific research either.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-08-2014, 06:48 PM:

Well it's only a few chapters in the Bible, so they had to do a lot of "fleshing out" to make a feature film out of it. But from what I have heard, the Bible parts are:

- Noah, although much younger

- The flood itself, except some of it comes from underground (wtf?)

- Noah's wife

- Noah's sons

- Some of Noah's in-laws

- Noah's drunkenness after the flood is over

Not from the Bible:

- Giant living rock monsters (unless they are fallen angels, as noted above)

- Noah getting news of the flood in a dream (as opposed to hearing the voice of God, which is in the Bible)

- The giant battle, although if there was a huge flood and there was only one guy with an ark, what would you do?

- Noah thinking that ALL of humanity (including himself and his family) was due to be exterminated -- in the movie, he thinks his only job is to care for the animals to make sure they survived

- Several serious make-out scenes

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-09-2014, 01:52 PM:

The make-out scenes were in the Bible and the book also had much more nudity.

And Noah is a chump. He didn't even get two of the giant rock monsters on His boat and that's why we don't have any giant rock monsters today.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 04-12-2014, 06:22 PM:

Even if you're not associated to any faith or religion, the story of Noah and his Ark is probably not entirely unknown to you. It's not the most original material to rely on and that's probably the understatement of the year...

And, what I simply don't understand: Why is anybody even trying to make a Hollywood blockbuster with a (semi-)religious back-story that's not some comedy or persiflage anno 2014? Who are you trying to reach? The ones faithful to the religion(s) that will bash your movie because of all it's consistencies? Or those who will happily boycott your movie, because it has religion all over it, in huge blinking neon letters?

And what's the deal with Darren Aronofsky? He never struck me as a religious type or did I miss something in his previous movies?

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 04-14-2014, 09:35 AM:

quote: Mike Blakesley
On the one hand it would attract a lot of the faith community, but on the other hand it might rub a lot of them the wrong way on that particular weekend, so maybe it might be better to wait another week. Maybe I'm over-thinking it.

You are not over-thinking it, Mike. Sure it might seem like the faith-based audience might be drawn to the subject matter, but they also have very strong, fairly immutable ideas as to what's biblical and what's not. Anything that's not, won't necessarily be accepted as literary license; it can be seen as tampering with their believe system and what's in The Book and they may not take kindly to that.

We have had no luck with titles that we thought might have drawn that audience group. All we got was grief. EVERYTHING caused gnashing of teeth...and at us. I think you are right not to do that link-up with Easter, although I am sure that's what Paramount's marking team wanted to do. And although it did decent business nation-wide, it can be very controvercial locally depending on your particular audience demographic.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-14-2014, 12:39 PM:

Here's what really pisses me off about this whole thing -- it's that Hollywood KNOWS there is a huge audience for this type of movie if it's done well. If they'd just done a straight re-telling of the story and avoided all the stupidity like the giant rock monsters, they might have had another Ten Commandments on their hands.

The Ten Commandments had a director who would go out and talk about how the movie was trying to be faithful to the source material as possible, and how he felt inspired by God to make as good a movie as he could, etc. all of which helped to draw people in. Which is the same thing that happened with Mel Gibson on "Passion of the Christ."

But for this movie, they hire a director who is supposedly an atheist, who chooses not to mention the name "God" in the movie, who goes out and says he's making the "least Biblical Biblical movie ever made" and they say they're "trying to play down the religious aspect" of the movie. WTF are these people smoking, anyway??

It's just more proof that Hollywood is run by idiots, as if we needed any. Talk about squandering the audience potential.

I hold out hope for the upcoming "Exodus." Although I'm sure they're already busy working on ways to ruin that story, too.

Posted by Terry Lynn-Stevens (Member # 7349) on 04-16-2014, 10:20 PM:

It sure was nice that Noah was flat instead of scope. To see the whole updated common-width screen fill up completely was great.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 04-17-2014, 12:45 AM:

Yeah, because flat is clearly the way to the future. Flat was around before scope, so they must be onto something... And also, because you know, of that immersion thing... Flat clearly matches the field of vision FAR better than this stupid, outdated scope format... And you know what's even better, no more ugly black bars in those DVD and BluRay releases!!

Although flat is a great leap forward, we're not entirely there yet. I propose a new aspect ratio standard: TALF, or "reverse" flat. It's essentially flat but rotated by 90 degrees. That way, it almost perfectly matches the aspect ratio of all those great iPhone videos out there. And the great news is: Theaters don't even need new equipment for this, they just have to rotate the screen and projector with 90 degrees and voila!

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-24-2014, 03:37 PM:

We did wind up playing this movie over Easter. It was probably the worst decision I've made all year. Every single person I talked to hated the movie. I don't think ANYbody came out saying it was good, like they usually would. Most people had that "well, THAT was a waste of money" look on their face as they walked out. It's the first movie in recent memory where I felt like standing there and saying "Sorry" to everyone as they exited, as opposed to "Thanks for coming."

I remain incredulous as to what Paramount was thinking with this thing. It may even hurt business for a while, because we had people in who hardly ever go to movies and this pile of crap is not going to be much help in encouraging them to come back.

Thanks for nothing, Paramount. Now try not to be so stupid with the Ben-Hur remake, OK?

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 04-24-2014, 04:00 PM:

Mike can make it up with "Heaven is for Real". He'll definitely bank on that one.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 04-24-2014, 10:12 PM:

I have had all kinds of inquiries about Heaven is for Real. People around here appear to be really interested in it.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-24-2014, 11:13 PM:

Same here....it's coming in a couple of weeks.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-03-2014, 05:55 AM:

quote: Mike Blakesley
Thanks for nothing, Paramount. Now try not to be so stupid with the Ben-Hur remake, OK?

Wait until they come out with their remake of The Ten Commandments from an atheist's perspective [Wink]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-21-2015, 06:55 PM:

quote: Joe Redifer
The make-out scenes were in the Bible and the book also had much more nudity.

I'm hoping that some day, someone will do a remake of The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah, but rather than have the camera pull away and the credits start rolling after Lot's wife had her sodium intake issue, show the bit in Genesis 19 that would make even the sodomy look tame and conservative (Lot gets drunk and then impregnates his daughters). Without wanting to stray too far into politics and religion, I'd be interested to see the reaction of, shall we say, a certain lobby to that. Their instinct would be to be outraged, but they could not object to the assertion that such a movie would be entirely faithful and accurate to The Bible. I'd nominate Tarantino to direct (though if he wanted to do a Biblical epic, the story of Huldah and Sisera in Judges 4 would be perfect for him, possibly starring Uma Thurman and Steve Buscemi).

quote: Mike Blakesley
Not from the Bible:

- Giant living rock monsters (unless they are fallen angels, as noted above)

- Noah getting news of the flood in a dream (as opposed to hearing the voice of God, which is in the Bible)

- The giant battle, although if there was a huge flood and there was only one guy with an ark, what would you do?

- Noah thinking that ALL of humanity (including himself and his family) was due to be exterminated -- in the movie, he thinks his only job is to care for the animals to make sure they survived

- Several serious make-out scenes

- Ray Winstone bumming a ride on the ark and not exactly embracing vegetarianism.

As for the movie itself, it was entertaining, well enough done and I agree completely with the comments above that Aronofsky had little effective choice but to add something to a story that is so familiar that you wouldn't have much of a movie if you didn't. I do think there was quite a lot of ripping off of other movies going on, though. The landscapes, CGI monsters and battle scene were a Lord of the Rings import, and the final "Will he kill them?" scene clearly owes a lot to John Huston's version of Abraham and Issac in The Bible:In the Beginning.