A review by globosdepensamiento
Noah by Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
4.0
Last Friday, April 4, marked the theatrical release of a story of
bad omens, apocalyptic visions, floating corpses, and water, water, water…
Terrible dreams of death and destruction inhabit the mind of our protagonist. This is the story of NOAH, by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel.
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Before we begin, I would like to point out that, despite being an atheist myself, neither will I get into religious issues here nor judge anyone’s beliefs. However, I will refer to this story as the myth of Noah. I hope no one takes this as an offense since, fortunately, in my (short) life I have never met a Christian with enough faith to accept the Old Testament as reality and/or History. The stories collected in it can be traced back to several centuries before the creation of the monotheistic religions and comprise a varied collage of African, Asian and Eastern European mythological tales from beyond Egypt to India.
But focusing on the adaptation of the text, director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriter (and neuroscientist) Ari Handel presented us the apocalyptic story
One of the main peculiarities that displays the reinvention of the myth is that the writers practice a double play around the contextualization of the story: we all know that the original text refers to a remote past, virtually linked to the origins of civilization, but this adaptation leaves open, very subtly, the possibility that we are witnessing an apocalyptic future where Humanity, having caused its virtual self-destruction, it’s been relegated to abandon technology and anything that departs from energies more advanced than the heat of the sun.
As I say, the references are subtle and may be overlooked, but from some constructions with steampunk touches, to the fact that we speak of a world where the rain stopped to pour so long ago (see the caption for the first picture), it invites us to think of a post-nuclear planet Earth. Thus, we could be talking about a subtext in which the writers denouncing wars and global warming —although, again, very subtle.
Another twist to the original myth introduced by Aronofsky and Handel, which would fall within what I have described as “fill in the gaps” of the biblical tale, refers to how could Noah and his family perform the titanic task of creating an ark which would fit all existing species of animals. And since the answer is not “With patience”, I recommend you to skip this and the next paragraph if you don’t want to read a SPOILER: it was with the help of fallen angels who, in their descent from heaven, lost their wings, burned upon entering in Earth’s atmosphere, and turned into some kind of six-armed golems.
Of course, these characters offer multiple mechanisms to delve into the world presented to us, to help explain further what became of the rest of the human beings as they watched Noah build his ark. The initial reason for the angels’ descent was to help men become better, to evolve (to bring them the fire, if we were talking about the Greek myth of Prometheus), but they applied their teachings for hunting and war, and ended up confronting them. In fact, apart from Noah’s family, humans are represented in constant conflicts and acts of violence, with the Flood precisely starting during a great battle. This approach emphasizes the idea of intentionality on the part of the writers to establish parallelisms with today’s world.
The second part of the book, corresponding to the third and fourth original volumes, sets a change of scenery as the Flood has already taken and the family is taking care of the animals while floating adrift in an endless sea. This is where, by reduction of their living space, the story lends itself to more reflection and the resolution of family issues and moral conflicts already seeded in previous episodes: the boundaries between faith and madness are diluted in Noah’s mind; we face extinction of the human species from a questionable point of view; a twist is planted on the possible role and importance of the protagonist’s family… All while the tension keeps growing inside the ark.
And if this script, as you have seen, is well developed and has multiple layers, the work of Niko Henrichon in the artistic section is equally brilliant. Firstly, we should forget minor details such as the difficulty to distinguish some characters by their faces (even if they are father and son), especially in the final stretch. Everything else is spectacular and appropriate to the tone proposed by the writers: the visions, the oneiric passages, the landscapes, the expressiveness of the characters, the level of detail in certain settings, the design of buildings, clothing and contextualising elements… Absolutely everything is exquisite in the art of Henrichon and he himself already justifies the reading of this book.
A remake of the myth of Noah that, a priori, did not appeal to me at all in its film adaptation but, thanks to an interesting creative work of its writers, this book ended up convincing me to knock at the door of the box office this weekend. The visuals will probably pale compared with Niko Henrichon pencils and colors, but all the subtext proposed by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel is quite attractive, at least if they were allowed to take it to the end product of the film.
Be it through the pages of Henrichon or the frames of Aronofsky, Noah is a work of art that will not leave you indifferent.
[Originally published in Revering Comic Books]