"The snakes are coming too?" Thus speaks Noah's wife, Naameh, as a carpet of slithering CGI serpents joins the menagerie of digital beasts in this utterly preposterous, often exasperating, but endearingly unhinged epic from the director of Black Swan. Adapted from a bizarrely enduring myth that permeates cultures both east and west, Aronofsky's long-nurtured pet project is a broadly non-denominational fantasia (he calls it "the least biblical 'biblical film' ever"), merrily lifting riffs from a range of canonical and gnostic texts, with a sprinkling of the kabbalism about which he obsessed in Pi. The beasts that Noah wrangles on behalf of "the creator" (the G-word is unspoken) range from the recognisable to the quasi-mystical, with cats and rats and elephants joining griffin-feathered hybrids in the race for survival. I didn't notice a unicorn getting left behind, but frankly it wouldn't have looked out of place.
While images of damned human flesh tumbling from mountaintops recall DeMille, and a shot following a drop of rain nods towards the "tear of God" from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Noah has more in common with the traditions of sci-fi and fantasy than with the Ten Commandments. Remember, this project first broke water when Aronofsky and screenwriter Ari Handel were working together on The Fountain, an insanely ambitious time-traversing fable tantalisingly tag-lined: "What if you could live forever?" Even the opening screed ("In the beginning there was nothing… ") seems less Genesis than George Lucas, with the action apparently taking place long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, upon landscapes that veer from Tatooine to Mordor via the forbidden zone of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before ending up somewhere over the rainbow. Ominous scenes of blackened hordes descending upon Noah's wooden fortress call to mind the Orc attacks from The Lord of the Rings, while the floods themselves evoke the dystopian disaster of Waterworld.
As for the fallen angel rock monsters (gigantic Nephilim-era "Watchers"), they look like the boulder creature from Galaxy Quest and speak with the voice of Optimus Prime from Transformers. When one kneels to converse with Noah, you half expect to see Megan Fox bending over an ox cart while Shia LaBeouf utters biblical epithets. (Unsurprisingly, these bonkers creations were underplayed in pre-publicity, for fear of alienating the lucrative Congregational market who might object to film-makers messing with the gospel truth of a 600-year-old man being instructed by unearthly voices to build a floating zoo.)
Underneath all the madness is Clint Mansell's surging, swirling, haunting score, featuring a recurrent refrain that reminded me of the aching longing of David Bowie's Warszawa (some of the instrumental soundscapes from Low were originally intended as incidental music for The Man Who Fell to Earth – another genetic link to sci-fi). With its blend of eerie futurism and ancient bombast, Mansell's music lends harmony to the cacophony of human voices: Ray Winstone with a hint of pulpit-posh as Noah's meat-eating adversary Tubal-cain; Anthony Hopkins unashamedly Welsh as a wizard-like Methuselah; and Crowe doing all points Robin Hood in between bouts of sullen silence and teeth-gnashing roaring. While posters have portrayed Crowe's Noah as essentially "Gladiator in the rain" (John Logan did uncredited script rewrites), the titular figure is altogether less heroic, descending into swivel-eyed psychosis as he sacrifices children in favour of moths, driven to madness by the voices in his head – or absence of them.
Embodying the last gasp of the creator's pre-covenant vengeful tyranny (forgiveness comes later), Noah is an increasingly deranged extremist, a fundamentalist eco-warrior hellbent on wiping out mankind. In this breast-beating role, Crowe is all teeth, spittle and changeable hair arrangements, and if we believe in him at all (and, frankly, we often don't) it's because of the sterling efforts of Jennifer Connelly. As Naameh (a sorely underwritten role), Connelly anchors everything in credible human emotion, the devotion and anguish that her raging spouse inspires in her allowing us to engage with him. Without Connelly's mediating influence, Crowe's performance is a closed door – and if the movie has anything to say about faith, then it is largely by grace of her intercession.
Throw in a magical serpent's skin, a recurrent Garden of Eden flashback with pulsating apple heart, and a creation-of-life montage that plays like MTV-generation Terrence Malick, and Noah emerges as the strangest $125m ever spent by a major studio. When the film-makers shared an audience with Pope Francis a few weeks ago, Russell Crowe tweeted: "Thank you holy father @Pontifex for the blessing", reminding us that The Passion of the Christ became a record-breaking hit after Pope John Paul II reportedly declared: "It is as it was."
The studio, which had struggled (and failed) to make Noah more orthodox, subsequently heaved a sigh of relief as Aronofsky's grand folly enjoyed a $44m US opening weekend. Yet if Pope Francis offered a whispered critique of the film (his thoughts remain private, although the Vatican says he hasn't seen it), it can only have been along the lines of: "It is as it wasn't, but hey – I always had a soft spot for Zardoz!"
