Anghus Houvouras on Noah and the stormy sea of noble failures….
Noah is on its way into theaters soon, and the first reviews are hitting the net like a torrential downpour. The reviews are skewing towards the favorable, though a lot of words are spent discussing the imperfections and half-baked ideas of a movie that struggles to be all things to all people.
The recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is a celebration of strangeness delving into the wonderful world of what might have been. It’s a psychedelic, day-glo journey into what could have been a magnificent, garish nightmare. The same kind of loving treatment is being applied to Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage’s insane looking Superman Lives project that died during the inception phase.
I love the noble failures. Movies that take risks and try to be something different. High priced deviations from the form. There seem to be a lot of fans of these noble failures when they die on the vine in pre-production and the fruit of their labors is never harvested. However, when a weird movie actually make it through the stormy weather of the production cycle and see the light of day, we’re less forgiving.
This seems to apply to Darren Aronofsky’s epic biblical fantasy film Noah. Cinephiles are curious. Religious purists are agitated and concerned about factual accuracy (snicker). The movie is scraping a lot of raw nerves. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it would be nice if more big budget films openly courted this much controversy or stirred up this much interest. Big budget movies rarely generate this level of conversational complexity.
Someone gave Darren Aronofsky $130 million dollars to make an apocalyptic biblical fantasy. This is the kind of behavior we should be rewarding, even if the final film is flawed. Studios are so averse to risk these days that the existence of movies like Noah feels like an anomoly. Some critics are comparing Noah to bloated blockbusters like Waterworld. Lazy critics and entertainment writers make comparisons like this because it takes little effort. Buoy one water themed, high priced studio film with questionable box office potential to another, but I take issue with this. Not just because of the hyperbolic box office disaster that Waterworld is still saddled with (not a massive hit, but $400 million worldwide adjusted for inflation is hardly the disaster some paint it to be), but more for the assertion that large, weird risky spectacles are something that shouldn’t be attempted. The dismissal of these beautiful disasters seems odd. Do film journalists really prefer a world where crazy films like Waterworld don’t exist?
Media writers seem to love the idea of movies like Noah, but then go knives out when it hits the marketplace and the square corners don’t necessarily fit into the round holes, creatively speaking. Sure, Noah is unconventional. The very concept of the project seemed insane when it was first announced, and everything I’ve seen subsequently has only bolstered that assertion. Everybody seems to get behind the idea of strange epic films that defy conventional categorization. In theory we want to see Burton’s crazy zombie version of Superman realized or would love to know how Jodorowsky’s Dune would have turned out. Once those ideas are brought to fruition, it’s much easier to judge them It’s easy to love the idea of Jodorowsky’s Dune. The reality of the finished product, for example David Lynch’s off maligned adaptation of Dune, is often a much less attractive proposition.
I’d bet a hefty sum that if Lynch’s version of Dune died in pre-production, there would be someone making a documentary about what could have been. Much like those who question what a Lynch helmed version of Return of the Jedi would have ended up being. As opposed to Lynch’s actual version of Dune which is a magnificent monstrosity that most people would prefer to forget.
We romanticize the idea of what never was because it never went beyond the inception phase, even though the reality is often far less inspirational. I’m guessing Jodorowsky’s Dune and Burton’s Superman Lives would have ended up with an even number of promoters and detractors, as so many noble failures often do.
As a fan of film, I admire the noble failures like Dune and Waterworld because while they are far from perfect, they are unique films that deviate from the norm. We should celebrate these kind of projects rather than question or attempt to validate their existence.
Whether Noah turns out to be another noble failure is yet to be seen, but I for one am glad it exists and hope more studios are willing to take risks on weird, wonderful big budget blockbusters.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published March 22, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
