The Ark

So, you live with your large, grown family who have terrible table manners but otherwise rub along pretty happily together.  One day, while sitting and contemplating your strangely arid farm, God's messenger, in the form of Ashley Walters, plops down beside you and tells you God is fed up with the greed, selfishness and violence of human beings and is going to send a flood to drown them all.  Understandable enough, you reckon, if a bit drastic, but then comes the killer: you alone can save mankind!  All you have to do is build an enormous wooden structure, waterproof it and persuade as many people as you can to join you, and drag in some animals that will come your way.  The phrase "easier said than done" could have been coined for poor Noah (David Threlfall), previously considered a devout, strict but kindly old eccentric.  It goes without saying that Mrs. Noah, Emmie (the estimable Joanne Whalley) and the offspring don't exactly jump at the idea of hard labour and ridicule for building an ark in the sunny desert.

This is a nice re-telling, emphasizing the human aspects of the story - the sons' longing for independence; the wife's despairing, "Please tell me you've miscalculated the size?!" - if a little oddly paced.  Thirty minutes into a ninety-minute production before God's instructions arrived meant little time for the actual flood, which was, as CGI effects go, pretty underwhelming. Forty days and forty nights took little more than forty seconds of rather muddled images of water walls.  For bibliophiles, too, it may have been puzzling, since Canaan (Nico Mirallegro) is here Noah's son who strays off the righteous path through no fault of his dad's.  Ah well.  The core message of, umm, keeping faith despite all, comes through, and the acting was nicely understated for a biblical epic.  It made a nice change from Easter-centric crucifixion tales and yes, apparently rainbows are a reminder of man's covenant with God, not leprechauns and pots of gold, and the two are not the same....