Two of the year’s most anticipated releases premiered this week: Berlin hosted Darren Aronofsky’s scripture epic Noah, while Marvel’s latest saga – Captain America: The Winter Soldier – had its first showings in Los Angeles and London.
Both films went down well, here’s a sample of the reception…
Noah
While acknowledging it overreaches it ambitions in places, reviews seem to confirm our best hopes for the film: a bold and personal vision in blockbuster’s clothing. Noah opens in cinemas on March 27.
VARIETY: “The world’s most famous shipwright becomes neither the Marvel-sized saviour suggested by the posters nor the ‘environmentalist wacko’ prophesied by some, but rather a humble servant driven to the edge of madness in his effort to do the Lord’s bidding…
“Uneven but undeniably bold, personal, visually extravagant… Aronofsky imagines an exhausted hero who can’t understand why, if all mankind was meant to perish, he and his family should be saved… Crowe is incredibly good in these scenes – you feel his torment as if it were a fire burning him from the inside out.”
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: “Aronofsky wrestles one of scripture’s most primal stories to the ground and extracts something vital and audacious, while also pushing some aggressive environmentalism…
“This Noah, who receives his instructions about what to do from disturbing, quasi-hallucinatory visions, is presented as the last good man on Earth, the chosen one. Crowe’s splendidly grounded work here recalls some of his finest earlier performances.
“Working on by far his biggest budget in the wake of the great global success of Black Swan, Aronofsky bulks up his film not only with naturalistic spectacle but with fantastical elements that evoke both Ray Harryhausen and Peter Jackson.”
BAD ASS DIGEST: “This is a film that treats Biblical stories with the sort of sweeping fantasy filmmaking usually reserved for Greek myth, and it is filled with the kind of moral and theological debate that is usually kept to small budget festival movies.
“Strange and idiosyncratic, it’s profound and overblown… When I say that Noah is weird I don’t necessarily mean that it’s filled with strange story elements or magical moments (although it has both). I mean that it’s a movie that thinks it’s totally normal to insert big ideas into a blockbuster, that believes a PG-13 movie can have its protagonist be so complicated that he becomes the antagonist, that it’s a movie that tackles the silliest, most unbelievable tale in Genesis without a trace of irony or even disrespect.
“Noah is defiant of the blockbuster model in many ways, not the least being that this is not a film for everyone, it’s not a four quadrant middle of the road blandfest. This is a personal movie writ large, a movie that challenges itself and its audience.”
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Marvel’s Cap’n America was last seen in his own film (2011) fighting the Nazis and ultimately frozen in ice. The first reviews for this sequel are positive (no small feat for a blockbuster) and all are appreciative of the hero’s continued grounding in real world-ish politics, here it’s a Cold War-inspired backdrop. Opens in 2D and 3D on April 4.
VARIETY: “The perils of global diplomacy, and the difficulty of being an old-fashioned guy in a new-fashioned world, weigh heavily on Marvel’s defrosted superhero in his surprisingly equal second solo outing. Trades the earlier film’s apple-pie Americana for the uneasy mood of a 1970s paranoia thriller — a resonance underscored by the casting of Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men star Robert Redford.
“Chockfull of the breathless cliffhangers dictated by the genre, but equally rich in the quiet, tender character moments that made the first film unique among recent Marvel fare… The directors don’t seem entirely comfortable on the large-scale action canvas, and [they have a] penchant for shooting action with a nervous handheld camera…”
TOTAL FILM: “A tremendously satisfying blockbuster… Despite its running time, it never drags thanks to a consistent line in bruising set-pieces.
“The end result does at least help to bring around some seismic shifts to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a brave move from a studio unwilling to rest on their (ridiculously successful) laurels.”
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: “Takes the bold (for Marvel) step of reducing CGI spectacle to a relative minimum in favour of reviving the pleasures of hard-driving old-school action, surprising character development and intriguing suspense.
“[Brims] with vehicular chases, surprise attacks, shootouts, fist fights, Energy Baton takedowns, miraculous rescues and surprising demises… However, when humans go at it one on one, directors Anthony and Joe Russo go nuts, forsaking credible and exciting action within the frame for overcutting of such intensity that you can’t tell what’s going on.
“For fans who might forget to stay to the very end of a Marvel film, there are not one but two teasers embedded in the end credits, one at the beginning and another at the conclusion.”
