Noah is remarkably ill-conceived: an anti-technology, anti-human, pro-environmental, pro-vegan fantasy epic. Too unfaithful to the Biblical record to please the religious and too talky to please the action-movie crowd, it lurches from scene to scene for two hours before becoming so preposterous it collapses under its own weight.
Noah takes place on a planet with a single super-continent covered almost entirely by massive cities built by evil men. What makes them evil? They’ve cut down all the trees. They’ve discovered strip-mining. They build cities and make things out of metal. They carry weapons. They eat meat.
Noah and his righteous family, by contrast, live alone on the edge of a desert, and look pretty well-fed, given that they eat nothing but the occasional dandelion. One day, after dreaming about drowning, Noah visits his grandfather, Merlin, a wizard who wields the magical sword Excalibur and lives in a mountain cave. Merlin gives Noah a magic bean that, when planted, yields both a magic spring and a magic forest, complete with the trees Noah will use to build an ark.
Noah, assisted by the love children of the Transformers and those rock trolls from Frozen, proceeds to build a boat to save his wife, three sons, and Hermione from the Harry Potter movies. But long before the ark is finished, thousands of pairs of animals (living where, exactly, and on what, given that men have destroyed all vegetation on the planet?) show up to be rescued.
Fortunately, Noah’s wife, who, up to this point, has had no part in the film beyond looking amazed and pushing out babies, has a third skill: making dandelion incense capable of putting wild animals into forced hibernation for forty days and forty nights. So things go pretty well until an army of strip-mining, tree-felling, meat-eating men show up, demanding to know how Noah is creating fresh water, growing instant forests, and effortlessly penning up so much tasty, tasty meat. Because, you know, on a depleted planet, those skills could come in handy.
It turns out those evil men are led by a Viking who, in his younger and prettier days, killed Noah’s father and stole the family birthright: a magic snakeskin that glows in the dark when wrapped around your forearm. A battle ensues, with Noah and the Transformers on one side and the Viking hordes (wearing … welding masks?) on the other.
But the fight doesn’t matter much, because before the CGI armies can fight for too long, the CGI Transformer Trolls rocket off back into space, and a massive CGI tsunami wipes out all the evil men, except for the lead Viking, who chops through the wall of the ark with an axe, plugs the hole before the ark can sink, and hides under a pile of sleeping snakes and monitor lizards to plot his revenge on Noah.
Meanwhile, Noah’s sons are depressed and angry, because they’ve done the math: unless their older brother pimps out Hermione, ain’t nobody getting their freak on in this New World Order. Noah cheers them all up, though, by explaining that the reason the Creator had them survive the flood is so that they can all bury each other, one by one, until the last evil human is dead and the world is perfect again.
Fortunately, without anyone else in the family knowing it, Grandfather Merlin appeared to Hermione just before the flood, goosing her belly, making her extremely libidinous, and giving her the gift of fertility. Pregnant out of wedlock, she births a pair of twins, which delights Noah’s wife (“Now there’s a girl for each of my boys!” — and, yes, she actually says this out loud) but angers Noah, who was looking forward to everyone dying peacefully, one by one.
The ark finally runs aground somewhere on the coast of Iceland. The Viking springs out of hiding, having subsisted for more than month by eating tranquilized reptiles (which explains, perhaps, what really happened to the dinosaurs). He attacks, but fails to kill, Noah, who survives, but goes insane.
After deciding at the last minute not to strangle his sons’ future half-sister-cousin-wives, Noah runs away, becomes the first alcoholic, and gets naked on the beach. After hitting rock bottom, he goes through the First Twelve-Step Program and makes amends with his wife by joining her in planting fresh dandelions. This endears him instantly to everyone except his middle son, Ham, who sets a good example for us all by walking out of this movie.
The film’s final scene has Noah, the reformed alcoholic and wanna-be baby killer, rubbing his glow-in-the-dark snake skin on his infant granddaughters. He tells his family the story of the Big Bang and explains how they all evolved from single-cell organisms into higher apes. Meanwhile, his youngest son, Japeth, looks down at his sister-in-law’s twin baby girls, thinking, “In about fourteen years, I’ll have my pick of this litter.”
The unnamed Creator is so pleased with this incestuous clan of evolutionist vegans, the sky bursts not into a double rainbow — but a sextuple rainbow. The music swells, and all’s well because, well, everybody in the new world is going to be white. And vegan.
I am not making any of this up.
If you want to see it, Noah is playing multiple times a day at every theatre in the universe — until next week, when it’ll be on two or three screens in Wisconsin, and the following week, when it’ll go quickly to OnDemand and Blu-Ray.
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