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I found it mostly tedious when it wasn't goofily ridiculous. At the top, the movie represents the fall of man, showing a silhouette grabbling the forbidden fruit, and then a comically voracious SCRUNCH! takes place off the screen. It makes it hard to take what follows seriously, as much as it demands to be taken seriously.
The visuals, like most epic films of the last decade, owe obvious debts to Lord of the Rings. Noah interacts with a race of giant creatures briefly referred to in Genesis, and they end up playing a large role, very much like the ents of LoTR. An inscrutable villain is also made of Tubal-Cain, a biblical figure who also warranted only a single biblical verse, apparently credited as the father of metal smithing. And based on this lone reference, the story seems to take place in some proto-Iron Age. Methuselah for his part, is a reclusive wizard. There ain't nuttin' in the Bible about no Level 10 magic users.
They use cheap devices to deal with the obvious challenges of depicting the story. Noah's wife is depicted as some sort of magical herbalist, so they confront the question of how they spent all that time feeding the animals and mucking the stables by having her whip up an incense concoction and having the family walk dramatically and elf-lik around the stables and cages with censers until all the animals (but not the humans, somehow) fall asleep.
This frees the family up to have internecine spats. Noah seemingly draws a lot of inspiration from The Mosquito Coast, it would seem, in that being a prophet of doom and the father of the future puts a lot of weight on one man's shoulders, and turns a body into a real asshole. The film tries to be about fatherhood, in that regard, in that being your family's protector forces you to do a lot of horrible things to keep the burden of sin from the rest of the brood. But doing those things turns you from your family's hero to your family's monster mighty quick.
Obviously, the story is short enough that extra-Biblical stuff needs to fill in some of the blanks to flesh out the story, but most of these choices are to indulge the visual whims of the production --- the Watchers, the flood bursting from the ground in giant geysers. Or alternatively, to set up boilerplate conflicts --- much is made as the deluge approaches of the obvious plot hole that Ham and Japheth don't yet have wives. That's not extra-scriptural, that's counter-scriptural. And it's just an excuse to place brooding sons against crazy dad.
The visual effects don't always fail --- the cartoonish serpent is goofy, but an extended ILM sequence depicting the seven days of creation is really good stuff. It would have made a cool-assed Peter Gabriel video, but in this film, it's just a vacation from the tediousness of the main narrative. Noah has already become a horror at this point, so he's telling you this story, invoking all these beautiful images depicting an evolutionary creation, and you want to say, "OK, here's his redemption," but you look at your watch and you know it's not to be.
They try and get in some meaningful themes. Noah is raising his family as vegans as opposed to the sons of Cain, represented by most of humanity, tearing at the flesh of slaughtered beasts. This is actually scripturally based. Noah is also suggested to be a pastoral naturalist, standing in opposition to the industrialists drawing society into cities.
OK, but i got the idea that the flaming moral ambiguity/moral disintegration of the asshole patriarch is what they really want to sell you. Maybe they wanted to make an Old Testament Breaking Bad.
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