Noah (2014)

Every ancient civilization has a flood myth and the one involving Noah is the Judea-Christian version of that ubiquitous story of the end of man.  The world will end not in fire, but in water.  That is the unsurvivable and terrifying disaster that angry gods rain upon their delinquent subjects.  The basic story of Noah is well known and this version sticks mostly to the facts, but adds an evil heathen warrior king to the boat to make it more interesting.  He eats a number of species into extinction before his untimely demise, which is just the beginning of the elimination of species on earth. 

Most of what I thought about this movie is that it is not very good.  Here are some of the up sides.  Russell Crowe is well cast as Noah.  The brooding isolate life that Noah lead prior to the flood is a good fit for Crowe, as is the sanctimonious judging the character evolves into over the course of building the enormous ark by hand.   The movie deals with some of the overwhelming logistics of getting a pair of everything onto the boat, what that would look like, and how people not convinced that a flood was coming would react very well.  It allows for one to picture the magnitude of what he was undertaking.  Now for some of the downsides.  Noah had to make a decision that seems crazy to all those around him, but he didn't have to go completely off the deep end, as he did in this version of the story.  The movie is about an hour too long (clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes), and a lot of this movie should have been left on the cutting room floor.