"  It's a movie so ridiculous and contrived that I honestly cannot believe someone on the entirely-A-List cast didn't call filming to a halt. "

      Title: Noah from Paramount Pictures

      Starring: A bunch of people who should all know better.

      Reviewing Monkey: Dungapult

      Let's cut to the chase: Noah is, easily, the least-entertaining movie-going experience I've had in my adult life.

     It's certainly not good. It's not so bad it's fun. It's not even joyous to mock. It's just a time-suck that robs you of 2.5 hours of your life--like that machine in The Princess Bride, if it did the damage in real-time.

      It made me feel like a four-year-old in an astrophysics lecture: I have no idea what they were trying to accomplish, I was bored out of my skull the entire time, and--aside from getting to see a few pretty pictures of scenery--I felt like sitting through it was some kind of obscure and nonsensical punishment.

     The one thing it did manage to accomplish was to somehow take Jennifer Connelly--the woman I have referred to as "The Future Ex-Mrs. Dungapult" since I was seven-years-old--and make her less attractive to me. Something I honestly didn't think was possible.

     I can't even jokingly make it her version of an "Oscar-winner's rock-bottom movie"; like Catwoman was for Halle Barry and Aeon Flux was for Charlize Theron--because at least those movies were good for laughing at. Instead, Noah was just the slow, methodical pain of being stuck in the back seat behind a driver who has no idea where they're going, refuses to ask directions, and yet for some reason thinks you should be grateful to be along for the ride.

     It's a movie so ridiculous and contrived that I honestly cannot believe someone on the entirely-A-List cast didn't call filming to a halt. At some point they had to know how awful this drek would turn out being...

     Not because it's Biblical, nor because it's not Biblical. Not because it is a historical drama, nor because it lacks any form of historical accuracy.

     No, Noah is a waste of life, money, and celluloid because it is a ham-fisted social diatribe apparently written by a pre-teen who thinks they're being clever by "veiling" an adolescent view of environmentalism within the "edgy" guise of an Atheist's take on Christianity.

     Not set on any Earth you'd recognize, Noah presents a magical world-before-time when only evil men ate meat, when industry, steel armor, and gunpowder were commonplace, but that--somehow, inexplicably--existed before mankind figured-out agriculture, trade, or fishing.

     Go ahead and re-read that admittedly run-on sentence, because right now your rational brain is insisting that there must be a slew of inaccuracies there. But there isn't.

     It really is that stupid. And it is, very-intentionally, a concept housed within the guise of a classic tale strictly to try and get your ass in a seat so that it can preach juvenile philosophy at you.

     Since you know it's a movie called Noah about a guy who builds an ark, you would assume that it's about a socially-corrupt planet that needs to be cleansed in order to give morality a fighting-chance in the future. But you'd be wrong.

     Instead "The Creator" (who is sort of, but not really God) has decided that he's had enough of humanity strip-mining the entire planet in search of a fictional ore, and so he charges Noah with eradicating all of humanity. And when I say all, I do mean all--Noah's wife is past child-rearing age, his adoptive daughter is barren, and he very deliberately prevents his sons from bringing any women on the boat. Thus--and, again, deliberately--when his youngest dies of old age all that will be left are the superiorly-inferior animals who will care for earth as The Creator intended. Because, apparently, an entity that can manufacture the heavens from nothing can't come up with a better genocidal plan than leaving a lone dude to cull the Earth at a snail's pace.

     Which, actually, is a pretty-good analogy for this movie as a whole.

      Add in a bunch of extras who are cookie-cutter villains, an entirely-unnecessary side-plot about how Noah and the leading antagonist are the decedents of brothers who also feuded, and some of the worst CGI monsters ever put on film, and you have a snooze-worthy evening that is absolutely guaranteed to make you feel like an idiot for wasting your time and money.

     When our screening ended, everyone in the theater looked at each-other, collectively murmured "That was awful," and all trudged forlornly back to our cars--each dreading the fact that we would have to drum-up a few hundred words to express how badly we wanted our evening back.

     It was a waste of time in the worst possible way, and my life is poorer for not only sitting through that hackneyed, anti-climactic drivel--but also for having to waste both your and my time by talking about it.

      The Verdict: