Top Guns

Gunning To Glory

Top Gun
Directed by Tony Scott
USA 1986
Paramount Pictures Blu Ray Zone B

and

Top Gun: Maverick
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
USA 2022
Paramount Pictures Blu Ray Zone B

The first of an occasional series of double, triple and quadruple bills, mostly because I don’t have much to say about any of them as a single movie, truth be told.

Warning: Some spoilers.

I’ve never watched any of the Top Gun films before now. I wasn’t a fan of the young Tom Cruise (and think he’s absolutely great in his later career) and I really didn’t want to watch what amounts to a dressed up Navy recruitment movie. Added to this, I used to work in a record store on Saturdays at the time of the first film, while I was going through college and, honestly, that rubbishy best selling songtrack album was horrible to have to endure week after week.

However, my mother accidentally caught the recent sequel on telly last year and liked it a lot and so, as one of her Christmas presents this year, I got her the double Blu Ray pack of both movies. So, yeah, guess what I had to watch over Christmas this year?

Okay, so both movies are pretty much the same but they are different in the way they do it. Of the two, I think the first one by uber director Tony Scott is the less interesting. It’s not a great movie but it’s not downright terrible either. Just a film about Tom Cruise playing Maverick, a best of the best trainee pilot at the Top Gun flight school in the Navy. His co-pilot is Goose, played by Anthony Edwards (and Goose’s wife is played by Meg Ryan) and Maverick’s high profile rival is Iceman (played by Val Kilmer). Maverick’s love interest is played by Kelly McGillis.

The story is just toned down Porkys humour coupled with fast flying, naval cadets not doing what they’re told, a tragic loss to add a dash of drama and the obvious combat scene at the end. I’m guessing it must have somehow caught a mood at that point in the 1980s which I just wasn’t a part of.

However, it is directed by Tony Scott so there is some great photography and a few moments when he goes ‘full Bava’ on the colour palette, such as when Maverick is cradling Goose’s head (who promptly dies) as they float in the sea waiting for rescue. Harold Faltermeyer’s score is okayish (not as brilliant as Beverly Hills Cop and Fletch) but it didn’t really make much of an impact on me until it was extensively re-used by Hans Zimmer in the sequel, to be honest. Or maybe the mix in the second one was just kinder to it.

Top Gun Maverick hits all the same beats more or less. A still arrogant Maverick is called in to teach a bunch of Top Gun graduates how to pull off an almost impossible mission in a limited timeline. Miles Teller is playing Rooster, son of Goose, so that Maverick has a dramatic arc of survivor’s guilt via the offspring of his old co-pilot. The always watchable Jennifer Connolly plays his new love interest but, yeah, it’s not too hard to pick up on the fact that this is an old and troublesome flame who is mentioned by name a few times in the first film (just never seen until now). Val Kilmer is back as Iceman, suffering from the same illness as the actor did in real life.

The sequel is pretty much the same thing but it seems more interesting and I suspect that’s more to do with the contemporary language and the attitudes in this one, even though they’re employed to tell a similar story. And not just a similar story to Top Gun either... you’ll recognise many aspects of the final mission they are working towards as being exactly the same as the Death Star run in the original Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope and reviewed by me here). They even have a Top Gun equivalent of Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no try.” added into the mix.

Zimmer’s score, which highlights Faltermeyer’s old themes, seems much more epic and useful to the film as a whole (I liked it when I saw him do it in concert at one of his live shows too) and, all in all, Top Gun Maverick is a less bitter pill to swallow. I also trust the older version of Tom Cruise more and find him eminently more watchable than he was as a youngster.

All in all, then, I didn’t have a terrible time with either Top Gun or Top Gun Maverick... I can appreciate the second one more. Neither of them are great films but I can understand, I think, why people gravitate to them. You might well be one of those people so, yeah, please don’t take my word for it.

Alita - Battle Angel

Alita Shade Of Pale

Alita - Battle Angel
2018 Canada/Argentina/USA
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
UK cinema release print.

So the latest film by director Robert Rodriguez and producer James Cameron is a live action adaptation of a manga (and, later, an anime) called Gunnm (and also known as Battle Angel Alita). Now I’ll do my usual disclaimer here and state up front that I have neither read any of the volumes of the manga nor seen any of the adapted anime episodes of this so, the one thing I can’t do here is tell you how this is as an actual adaptation of the source material.

I can tell you some other stuff though including the fact that I was kinda conflicted about going to see this one because... well I’m not the biggest fan of James Cameron, although I quite liked his first film in The Terminator series, ALIENS and The Abyss. When you get to stuff like Avatar though... count me out. Rodriguez, however, is a director I’ve always quite liked.... especially his Sin City films, his Planet Terror contribution to the Grindhouse movie (especially the extended, stand alone version) and his Machete movies. However, when I saw the trailer, it didn’t really look like a Rodriguez movie... but it did look spectacular. I also found the enlarged eyes of the main Alita character kinda interesting.

The film tells the story of Alita, played by Rosa Salazar as a full CGI version (so I guess she does the voice and possibly motion capture), who is a cyborg found by Dr. Dyson (played by Christoph Waltz) on a garbage heap dumped from the last surviving sky city and left unwanted in Iron City (which is presumably on Earth). She has a human brain inside her head and when the doctor revives her, no memory of her former life although, as the movie throws her character into violent conflicts, she tends to have flashes of memory as to what she really was in her former life 300 years before.

And that’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot because, contrary to my worries that this film would be a special effects laden spectacular with no story... it does actually have a good tale to tell with the central mystery of the past held in Alita’s head and, frankly, a lot more heart than I was expecting from a film like this.

Yep... I really loved this movie and that kinda took me by surprise.

In addition to Salazar and Waltz... who are both utterly brilliant in their roles... we have Jennifer Connelly playing a sinister character and, also, Ed Skrein, who also plays a good villain (such as in Deadpool, reviewed by me here) but who also deserves to be given more heroic roles such as the surprisingly decent job he did jumping into Jason Statham’s shoes for The Transporter Refuelled (which I reviewed here). However, here he’s back to being a villain again and, as you would expect, he does a good job of it.

The set designs and art direction are first class and you can see how you would never have got to movies like this without a direct legacy back to the 1982 movie Blade Runner (reviewed here) and some of the other films influenced by it over the years such as The Fifth Element and Ghost In The Shell (reviewed here). But more than that, the title character has such charm and a kind of essential innocence to her character (in spite of some of the things she has obviously been trained to do in her former life) that you never lose sight of the story and it’s warm, beating human heart as we watch her eat chocolate for the first time, fall in love and learn how to play a violent roller skate sport which is obviously based on Rollerball and which takes up a lot of the screen time here in terms of the action sequences.

Now, I know there are some people out there who may find the story structure a bit disappointing. I think it was about half way through the movie when I realised there were going to be no main story resolutions here and you can kind of see where the potential sequels are going to pick up the ball. In fact, the director and producer (and writers, I guess) have been criticised with spending too long setting up the sequels but, frankly, I thought it was more a natural ebb and flow of the dramatic narrative and I think this is one of the few movies I’ve seen of recent years which manages to completely pull this off and still leave a certain amount of dramatic closure for the viewer.

Talking about narrative structure... there are a few scenes where things are implied rather than directly spelled out but that’s cool, I’m always down with not spoon feeding the audience too much on these things. I was also happy that the big eyes of Alita were not nearly as distracting as I thought they would be. You kind of get used to them really quickly and I found myself wondering, at one point, were they actually any bigger than a normal person’s eyes or was I imagining it? It really doesn’t take long for your brain to adapt.

So... shorter review I guess because I didn’t really have any grumbles with Alita - Battle Angel and was both thoroughly entertained and, surprisingly, quite moved by it in some places. Adding to the whole ambience of the movie was some nice action scoring by Junkie XL which really held things together and once more confirmed my suspicions that he’s one of the more promising composers working in film scoring these days. But there you have it... once again, sorry for the shorter review for this one but when you get a film as pitch perfect as Alita - Battle Angel then there’s not too much else to say until you’ve studied it on multiple viewings. Other than I’m hoping that this does really well at the box office so we can see the next installments sooner rather than later (or not at all, in the worst case scenario). My one bit of advice would be to make the journey to your local cinema to see this one because... yes it’s got heart and soul but, as you might suspect from the trailer, it also looks pretty darn spectacular. So don’t miss it in the venue it was designed for. After all, Alita bit of what you fancy does you good.

Phenomena

Doo Doooo, Be Doo Doo

Phenomena
Italy 1985 Directed by Dario Argento
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

“I chose Switzerland as it's somewhere nothing much happens.”
Dario Argento

Back in the misty days known as the ‘Dawn of DVD’, a new chapter of European cinema of all shapes and sizes was opened up to me. I’d always been a big watcher of movies at home but VHS tapes were not releasing enough stuff in the correct aspect ratio and I refused, and still do to this day, to watch things in anything other than the ratio it was meant for... except in very rare cases where the original prints are no longer in existence and have never been made commercially available. Not only that... loads of the films available over here in the UK were shamefully censored by the BBFC, who even to this day are somehow allowed to be perpetrators of one of the most inexcusable crimes against filmanity ever... censorship.

So my ‘video junkie’ habit kinda slowed down to a ‘not quite stand still’ after a while. Then, however, DVDs were upon us and with them came the relative ease of ‘multiregion players’. You could literally walk into your local TESCO, buy a player and then look up the appropriate remote control button combination hack for the player you bought to make it ‘region free’. It’s not quite so easy with Blu Ray these days but it’s still not that hard to get a proper multizone player... thank goodness. Otherwise cineastes in Britain would be suffering even more due to the greed of the companies who want to jack up the prices to foreign countries. Not to mention the censorship and ‘time of release’ issues. Back in the day, you could buy the US edition of the DVD months ahead of the UK theatrical release for cheaper than the price of a cinema ticket and then, if you liked it, wait for it to come out on general release in the cinema in the UK and watch it like that too.

Long story short... not only were most of the DVDs finally being put out in the correct aspect ratio but you could get away from the drag of Victorian era censorship practices by just buying the uncut version from whatever country that was putting them out. There were even a load of shops selling the foreign discs in London, if you were worried about making transactions on the internet, at that time (pretty much all gone now).

And so, with the easy bypassing of censorship laws coupled with the quality transfer of the print (in most cases... don’t get me started on companies like ArtsMagic) and the correct frame size, a whole new vein of cinematic treasure was opened up to me which I’d previously ignored because I knew certain director’s films would be snipped by the censors in the UK editions (and still are, in many cases). So, of course, one of the first director’s films I went to take a proper look at... along with the likes of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin and Mario Bava... was the great Dario Argento. After years of admiring the soundtrack ads on the back of American magazines like Starlog.

This film, Phenomena, which has just come out in a ‘most but not quite all of the bells and whistles’ limited edition from Arrow, was the first Argento that, on my first watch, left me a little disappointed. I’d recently seen The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Deep Red (reviewed here), Suspiria, Tenebre (reviewed here) and Inferno (films like Four Flies On Grey Velvet were still not readily available on DVD in any other way than poor bootlegs still, at that time... now I have something like six different prints of that one) so I was being really spoiled with quality Argento. Phenomena, while still pretty good, has quite a different feel, in some ways, to those classic Argento films I just mentioned.

A fair amount of people seem to somehow, class this as a horror picture but, although there’s a strong supernatural presence in the film, this isn’t something the villain(s) of the piece, such as they are, can access and it really is another one of Argento’s trademark pictures... the Italian giallo. The supernatural element is similarly discounted in favour of true giallo leanings in such films as his aforementioned Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) and the modern giallo Tulpa (aka Perdizioni Mortali - reviewed here). When I first watched this one years ago (on the old Anchor Bay Region 1 double bill DVD with Argento’s Inferno) I remember thinking that, of all the Argento films I’d managed to see by that point, it was a bit of a dud. However, I’ve began to warm up to the unconventional feeling generated by the movie (it’s not really a whodunnit style giallo  in that there aren’t a gazillion suspects and one of the main killers is not introduced properly into the text of this film until he is more or less revealed) and since then, I’ve seen a fewArgento movies which, believe me, are far worse than this one (Phantom Of The Opera, anybody?). Although, it has to be said, I’m much more tolerant of his later stuff than a lot of his fan base seem to be these days. So yeah, watching this in the new Blu Ray transfer from Arrow was a pretty good experience (and also had its downsides... which I’ll get to in a while).

Set in Switzerland, the film follows a teenage girl played by Jennifer Connolly (called Jennifer) who has a psychic link with insects and an affliction where she sleepwalks (sometimes with an insect’s eyes’ view of a killing being committed). She befriends a wheelchair bound, Scottish forensic entomologist played by the late, great Donald Pleasance who, naturally, has a trained chimpanzee to help him get stuff done. Actually, the chimpanzee is used at one point as almost Argento’s only concession to the whodunnit style of the traditional giallo in this, when he uses the creature holding a razor blade early on in the film to put the idea in the viewers mind that, just maybe, the monkey is going to turn out to be the killer!

Monkey magic aside, though, he film is actually full of those beautiful compositions and swooping camera shots which are a bit of an Argento trademark but some viewers (myself included, first time around... about 17 years ago) may miss them because of the muted tones employed... cold whites, grays and blues... but not used as starkly contrasting against strong blacks or textures as those kinds of tones are in the director’s amazing movie Tenebrae (aka Tenebre), where they absolutely pop. Actually, there is one moment which stands in stark contrast to the rest of the movie towards the end of the film, where we cut to a shot of an airport, which is all the acidic, primary colours reminiscent of Argento’s more usual palette (which is a colour palette Bavaesque in style, to say the least). This scene is completely at odds with the visual tone of the rest of the movie, as far as I'm concerned. If you want to find out more about the whites, greys and blues and the way they are manifested then read Rachael Nisbet’s excellent essay on the fashions of the film which is the absolute highlight of the printed booklet in this limited edition set (and check out her blog too if you like excellent writing on Italian exploitation cinema... just click here).

Regardless of the visual style, the film is, however, a visual feast of strong composition and the movement through those compositions.

For example, there’s a beautiful shot through an elliptical glass window taking up approximately the left hand two thirds of a shot with Jennifer making a phone call in one half of the window which is artifically split in half by the back of the booth behind her, framing two other characters in the near distance in the right hand half of the split outside the booth. Then the camera pans slightly right as these two go to what was, until now, the last third of the frame and stops with the dead, right hand half of the window split in the now remaining first third of the screen. We cut to a quick insert of Jennifer in the booth reacting to their comments before we cut back to that same, original master shot. Then Jennifer leaves via that half split of the window and the other two girls leave as the camera follows Jennifer into the next part of the shot... as the window goes out of frame. Beautiful stuff.

Another interesting moment comes after a bus drops Jeniffer off while she's busy being the film’s Nancy Drew character. The camera movements directly after the bus unloads Jennifer kind of swoop into framing her at the same kind of speed and movement it used with the filming of the departing bus and everything kind of follows through in the same kind of motion. It’s moments like this which make Argento one of the great directors, as far as I’m concerned.

I also noticed, this time around, a kind of visual obsession (probably in this one film only but I’ll be on the lookout for it more now) of downward movement as objects are dropped, falling to the bottom of the screen. Argento does this at least three times here... once in the opening of the first murder of a girl played by his own daughter, Fiore Argento, when we get a beautiful detail shot of a pair of scissors dropping and sticking into the floor, accompanied by a nice audible clamor. These scissors will soon find themselves embedded in the girls hand. The second use of this strange dropping motif is of the girl’s head itself. As she is pushed back through a window, a little reminiscent of violence found in both Argento’s Suspiria and Tenebrae, we cut to the other side of the window above a waterfall as Fiore is decapitated by the glass and the camera follows the course of her head as it drops into the swirling, white waters below.

A third ‘drop’ shot takes place during a suspense scene in the last fifth of the movie, where Jennifer is trying to disentangle herself from an intravenous drip and leave a room before her guarding nurse wakes up and catches her. The nurse has fallen asleep while she is knitting and at one point, while Jennifer is making her escape, the kitting needle drops to the floor and we fear the sound of it may wake the nurse. However, instead of clanging to the ground, the needle drops perfectly into a waiting ball of wool in a shot very reminiscent, at least to these eyes, of the shot much earlier in the film of the dropping scissors. So I need to be revisiting all his work again now to see if he used this kind of visual echo in any of his other films (like I needed an excuse to revisit Argento with all these nice Blu Ray editions coming out).

One of the things about the movie which is kinda all over the place is the music. There were a lot of different composers working on this one, including Goblin’s former head honcho Claudio Simonetti and British composer Simon Boswell. The music is mostly pretty fantastic and a lot of it is included in a new, remastered CD presentation which has a few more tracks than previous editions, as a fourth disc in this Arrow limited edition set (alas, it still doesn’t contain Bill Wyman’s lovely, atmospheric track The Valley on the CD but, well, you can’t have everything I guess). Simonetti’s stuff is absolutely brilliant but, like a lot of the music in the film, quite often seems inappropriate to the imagery. There are some nice tranquil shots going on in a movie comprising, mostly, a laid back sense of pacing but, for the most part, the music is speeding along and doing its own thing for a lot of the time. It seems to me it works much more successfully as a stand alone listen but I know a lot of both Italian horror movies and gialli were being scored in this manner then so, you know, sign of the times and all that. It doesn’t deter from the beautiful visuals too much and it’s still a great score (I’ll admit, the remastered CD was the primary reason I pre-ordered this set).

The film marks the last shoot that Argento and Daria Nicolodi (mother of Asia Argento) worked on while they were still together as a couple (although not the last film they both worked on). Here we have Nicolodi killed in a hideous manner and also Argento’s other daughter Fiore meets an equally terrible fate. Daria is killed in an even more spectacular manner in the director’s excellent movie Opera, two years later and, one wonders whether that says anything about Argento’s character and attitude to his partner at the time. Probably not but I did find the interviews with him on the Arrow documentary a lot scarier and less benign than the usual ones.

It’s a pretty good documentary too... where I learned things such as the front view of a scene set in a car was shot in Italy while Daria Nicolodi and Jennifer Connelly’s part of the same scene involving a bee in the back of the car was shot in Switzerland. And I honesty would probably never had noticed it if it hadn’t been for this documentary but, now that I know it, I can see that the background whizzing by past the windows of the car doesn’t really match when the camera is pointing at either the front or back. So... don’t think I knew that before so much appreciation there to Arrow as they have commissioned quite a good documentary from the guys at www.freakorama.org. It’s interesting that nobody mentions the fact that Jennifer Connelly got the top of her finger bitten off by the chimpanzee and it had to be reattached in hospital, though. A bite is mentioned but it's somewhat downplayed here. However, there are a few things about this top notch Blu Ray that left me a little disappointed, to be honest.

First up, there’s the case of the elusive footage from the Japanese laserdisc version of the movie. The film is presented three times in this set... one in the International cut, one in the horrible US release Creepers cut and the obvious winner here, a hybrid version which is the longest to date and includes the extra footage from the Italian cut. However, the footage from the Japanese laserdisc, where Jennifer apparently levitates above the other children, doesn’t seem to be present. What’s more, nobody seems to be saying anything about it either. I asked Arrow directly a few times on Twitter if they were going to include the scene in their new cut but they seemed reluctant to even reply to me on this issue. What’s more, although the documentary doesn’t mention this footage, there’s plainly a sequence of archival footage in this very same extra which shows Argento and his crew shooting that missing scene. Talk about winding up the fans! It’s a shame that, if this footage couldn’t be found in something the producers of this disc thought salvageable for a high quality Blu Ray presentation, even as an extra, they didn’t at least acknowledge its existence. Oh well.

Also, for a package with an abundance of extras on every disc, why couldn’t they get the clearance for some of the old Anchor Bay bonuses to be included too? The Bill Wyman video of his musical contribution to the film, The Valley, is not on this one (and neither, as I mentioned above, is it on the CD soundtrack) and it’s a shame because, although it’s a bit of a slow burn the very first time you hear it, it’s actually quite a nice bit of scoring.

Another thing which annoyed me intensely was the fact that this disc is region locked and, not only region locked but it doesn’t have a screen to tell you about it. Now my Blu Ray player often defaults back to Zone A after it’s been on stand by for a while and so, when I put the first disc in, the machine tried to read it and then it just went black. It took me a few tries because Arrow didn’t see fit to include an apology screen for this horrible practice, before I realised I had to reset my machine to Zone B to be able to play it rather than send the thing back to Arrow as a faulty disc. I got there in the end but, honestly, for a company who are such a boon the UK home video market like Arrow are at the moment, you would expect at least the courtesy of a screen clarifying that you are trying to play it on the wrong region setting. This is something that companies like, for example, Shameless, do really well with.

Other than those few of points though... it’s well done again to Arrow for giving us a great package and especially for including the remastered score on CD. This is probably the absolute best version you could possibly get of Phenomena anywhere in the world, as far as I know (to date). If you are a fan of Argento’s work you will seriously want to make sure you have this new Blu Ray version of the film and, if you aren’t, make sure that if this is the first time you see this film that this is the version you watch. It's a movie which has grown on me over the years and it’s certainly a film like no other Argento’s done... quite unique in its atmosphere and flawless in its visual execution, at the very least. Watching this movie reminds me that I’d really like to retire to Switzerland some day. Who knows? One day that might even come to pass.

Noah

There Will Be Flood

Noah
2014 USA
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning of sorts: If you don’t already know the basic story of Noah And The Ark then there may, indeed, possibly be some kind of spoilers in here. Probably not though.

I’m not exactly the most religious person in the world... to tell the truth.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny the possibility of the existence of a God or some other kind of creator-like being or collective form of energy or whatever else one wants to believe in. And I would staunchly defend any man or woman’s right to believe in that kind of power and symbol of that power in their life. I just don’t know what to think or how to contemplate anything as alien as that which functions in a similar manner to that might be. If it either was or even is recognisable as a practical or spiritual reality is not something I can either judge as having a basis in our collective experience of life or not.

What I don’t personally believe in, however, is organised religion. It seems to me that this is just a tool used to control the masses through a sense of blind faith to a specific set of man made instructions or preferences to living. Without being any kind of expert on it, it seems to me the texts being used to progress these “clubs” or “societies” are questionable in the utmost and are as much about censorship and decisions made on our collective behalf for the good of those in power, as much as they are about anything they claim to be.

So although my initial reaction while I was watching Aronofsky’s version of Noah And The Ark was... “Hey, I don’t remember the bit in The Bible when the giant rock creatures help defend the ark against the evil humans while Noah gathered up his family.”... it has to be acknowledged that this is a much more forgivable form of artistic licence than, say, a James Bond film deviating 99% from the novel it was alleged to have been based on. At least I can be fairly certain that Ian Fleming wrote Moonraker, for example, and that the text he wrote is exactly what he imagined and, therefore, any liberties taken with it for the terrible movie adaptation of this were being committed in a much more culpable fashion than Noah which, obviously, was written by multiple authors, censored to the point that only a few of the author's versions are known to us and, ultimately, is questionable both in its intent and credibility.

Similarly, when Quentin Tarantino kills off Adolf Hitler by having him machine gunned to death in a cinema before that same cinema is blown to pieces in Inglourious Basterds, thus ending World War Two, I’m finding the admittedly brilliant denouement of this film far more questionable morally, in the context of education, than I do with Noah having giant rock creatures with angels inside them helping him build his ark.

Having got that out of the way, my experience as a paying member of the audience to Aronosfky’s movies is also something which is less than clear cut for me.

His first three feature length films... Pi, Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain... are all works of artistic genius, as far as I’m concerned. Not only are they completely brilliant, they are films which I could watch over and over again, every couple of years, without failing to be blown away by their incredible resonance and artistry. His fourth feature, The Wrestler, was also an incredible film but, for me, lacks that desire for repeat viewing which the films he made prior to that spoke to me with. It’s still a great film, mind you... just not one I’d want to revisit anytime soon.

But then came Black Swan (reviewed here)and he just lost me.

That movie had all the makings of another great work of art, with a wonderful concept. However, despite great performances by all the leads and a certainly competent standard of directing, it wasted its material. The intensity and ferocity with which the subject matter could have been shown just seemed heavily compromised and overly commercial, especially from someone with Aronofsky’s credentials. Without making too much of a meal out of it I’d have to sum it up, in the common vernacular of generations much younger than me, by saying it was... well... it was pretty “meh.”

Noah, if not a complete return to form by Aronofsky, and by that I possibly mean a return to the stylistic indulgences of my preferred earlier stage of his career, is an entertaining picture, if nothing else. It tells the story of Noah played quite credibly, perhaps even brilliantly, by an actor I have no special love of, Russel Crowe. His performance is by far the defining anchor of this movie and, as he is what the story is all about, that’s as it should be... although Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah does come close to stealing his thunder in a few scenes. Crowe is ably supported by performances from Emma Watson, Logan Leman, Douglas Booth, Ray Winstone (playing the ancient historical version of the local mafia gang leader, it seems to me) and the truly great actress Jennifer Connelly, who did such a brilliant, stand out performance for Aronofsky once before, in Requiem For A Dream. 

The actors though, do tend to take second place to the brilliance of the sweeping landscapes and the special effects as used in such sequences as Noah’s apocalyptic visions of the future “death by water” and the aforementioned giant rock people. The rock giants are in the film for quite a lot of the running time and so are a constant fantasy element to something which many would regard as being based purely on a fantasy novel anyway. Or at least a source text which has been so tainted by years of history in a far more corrupt and virulent way than a series of Chinese whispers that any truths the original text or word of mouth, in actual fact, might have had to them are now absolutely impossible to fathom.

I can’t say I was blown away by Aronofsky’s take on the story of Noah, but I wasn’t bored by it either. The quick cut montages of his earlier work to impact certain ritualistic and repetitive actions are still not returned to here, although there are moments where montages of hundreds of cuts work in a different way, as a kind of clunky version of time lapse almost, indicating quite soundly that the creative roots of Aronofsky as an artist in control of his own vision, rather than just doing what a studio would tell him to do, is still very much present. It’s therefore not right for me to criticise this movie in any other way than by what I personally do or don’t like, therefore. Aronofsky is an artist on his own terms still... and that’s to be respected in the utmost.

The film is quite long but the pacing is quite leisurely and probably seems to be a lot faster than it actually is. I in no way felt the running time myself... if asked I would have said it was an hour and a half movie, not a two hours plus epic. That’s a good thing and shows that my attention was held during the narrative, although I think the epilogue of the years after the great flood was a little unnecessary to the text as a whole.

Is Noah a film I’d recommend? Well, possibly for Clint Mansell’s quite lovely score but probably not for those with a strong religious conviction, that’s for sure. At least, my expectations are such that an audience composed of a belief system based on the legacy of a specific set of ideas presented as fact would find this movie unpalatable in some ways. As a fantasy movie, it’s not the most exciting I’ve seen but, like I said, it held my attention  and I think most audiences without a specific skewed interest in adhering to a supposedly “set in stone” source text would be hard pressed to bear it any grudge and, possibly, get a morally uplifting message from it, by the end of the film. It’s not one I’m ever going to return to, I suspect, but it’s a pretty competent piece of cinema and I can only hope that Aronofsky will return to the style of direction and choice of subject matter that I so loved from him in the early part of his career. So not particularly hit or miss and, yeah, not even particularly “Meh” either. Just a nice solid film which you can either take or leave on its own terms and that’s the last I need to say about it.