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Russell Crowe
Most viewing statistics provided by streaming services are too vague to have much meaning. Did 165 million people watch the first Rebel Moon movie, putting it on par with Barbie as one of the most-watched movies of 2023, or did 81.9 million Netflix accounts auto-play it while 100,000 people actually sat through longer than five minutes? From this morass of questionable statistics emerges the voice of the people, sort of: The Netflix Top 10, which displays the ever-changing group of movies and TV shows that are most-viewed by the platform’s subscribers. Questions about what constitutes a “view” still apply, but this chart at least provides points of comparison – and there’s no greater evidence that these titles aren’t gamed by the system than the absolutely bizarre assortment of movies that surface here. Remember the 2017 Dylan O’Brien/Michael Keaton red-meat terrorism actioner American Assassin? Neither do Netflix subscribers, who will ravenously consume it like it’s brand new, catapulting it into the Top 10 last month.
The reasons that certain catalog titles pop on Netflix are rarely easy to discern; apart from Christmas movies and the occasional sequel igniting interest in its predecessor, they tend to operate independently from traditional markers like anniversaries, seasonal changes, or a star’s recent activity. The chart is wonderfully unpredictable and mysterious. For example, is Darren Aronofsky’s 2014 Biblical film Noah currently occupying the Netflix Top 10 because it’s about a week away from its tenth anniversary? Or because Easter (not a holiday depicted in the film, but often a time for Bible-themed entertainment) follows a few days after that? Or because star Russell Crowe has a new movie out this week?
Likely none or all of the above. Noah is a particularly unusual case because, well, it’s a particularly unusual movie – a big-budget Bible story from the director of Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and The Whale, starring Crowe as the ark-building Noah, attempting to save the world’s animals (and his family) from the impending world-cleansing storm brought about by the Creator (which is how everyone in the movie refers to God). It’s also a relic of a less-ancient time when auteurs of the late ’90s were given bigger budgets and, surprisingly, made hit movies out of their sensibilities: David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle; Alexander Payne’s The Descendants; David Fincher’s The Social Network; and Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
Noah, Aronofsky’s follow-up to the hugely successful Black Swan — $330 million in worldwide box office plus five Oscar nominations, including a Best Actress win for Natalie Portman — came towards the end of this boomlet, and while it did reasonably well, it was also exactly the kind of movie studios looked at and thought, “This isn’t making as much money for us as a superhero franchise.” Now people are watching it en masse, a decade later. As Crowe himself recently noted online: “This is an interesting turn of events.”
It’s especially interesting because Noah is both far weirder than most movies that hit the Netflix charts, and less aggressively off-putting to mainstream audiences than much of Aronofsky’s work. As a retelling of a Bible story, it has grit and substantial inner conflict (in addition to plenty of external conflict in the form of large-scale battle scenes around the film’s midpoint). Its inner turmoil recalls a contemporary crisis-of-faith narrative, but Noah’s faith in the Creator is never in doubt; rather, he seeks the strength to carry out what he sees as God’s will. Aronofsky unsettled some viewers by reframing his quest as a kind of environmental parable, with Noah convinced that he is helping God to wipe out humanity, so that non-human life may continue to flourish on Earth, unspoiled by humans. This, too, has familiar echoes; Crowe’s Noah is like a more richly imagined version of the semi-sympathetic ecoterrorist-who-goes-to-far of so many Hollywood blockbusters. Similarly, Aronofsky visualizes the fallen angels who assist Noah as gigantic (and eventually marauding!) rock-creatures, like something out of a ’80s stoner fantasy.
Compared to the ravaged psychology of other Aronofsky movies, though, Noah feels downright stately, more loopy than traumatizing. Compared to the audience rebellion spurred by his sci-fi epic The Fountain and his more obtuse biblical allegory mother!, Noah could be read as a reasonable compromise, just as the self-injuring performers of Black Swan and The Wrestler are more legible (and less punishing) to a general audience than his characters in Pi or Requiem. Within this slightly more mainstream-friendly sensibility, he finds new outlets for his show-offy visual intensity, like a three-minute sequence that he was clearly born to distill: A flickering, time-lapse-style history of creation, synthesizing Crowe’s “in the beginning” narration, CG images of evolution, and familiar Biblical images (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel), like a speed-run through Terrence Malick country. This version of Aronofsky was enough of a concession to get Noah past the $350 million mark at the worldwide box office – and it’s easily Crowe’s biggest leading-role movie of the past decade. Still, it wasn’t exactly The Passion of the Christ as far as Bible-inspired blockbusters are concerned.
So what are all of these presumably newfound viewers thinking about Aronofosky’s divisive project? It’s not the easiest movie to search on the socials, but mostly the attention to its Netflix success, driven by Crowe, seems to have brought the Aronofsky defenders out of the woodwork in a way that, say, The Whale did not, with plenty of folks telling Crowe how much they appreciated it. The word “wild” comes up.
What’s especially wild about Noah is how this big swing from Aronofsky nonetheless feels more disciplined and accessible, in its way, than the superficially stripped-down theatrics of The Whale, which works up a sweat trying to control Aronofsky’s bombast, and winds up mounting a bizarre imitation of what audiences might want from him. Noah‘s attempt at mainstream mythmaking feels serenely confident by comparison. Maybe Noah also looks more palatable after a full decade of Christian-themed faith-based movies that tend to offer unchallenging, inspirational stories. At the time, Noah appeared to have the makings of a major boondoggle. As the best movie in the Netflix Top 10, though, it’s practically a miracle.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
