NOAH

Based loosely on the biblical "Noah's Ark", this movie starred Russell Crowe in the lead role of Noah, Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Anthony Hopkins as Noah's father, Ray Winstone as King Tubal-cain, Emma Watson as Ila and Logan Lerman as Ham. 

Noah's family belonged to a bloodline descended from Adam and Eve, who had 3 sons Cain, Abel and Seth after eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Cain was said to have killed his brother Abel and gave rise to savage and ruthless descendants, who were protected by fallen angels who turned into stone giants known as the Watchers, who continued their rampage to kill anyone and anything who were in their paths. Seth, on the other hand, was the good one who escaped and continued his lineage by living as nomads to protect earth and its inhabitants.

Noah received a message from the Creator through a dream which warned him of an impending great flood that would kill all men and signaled to him to build an ark to save what's left of earth's creatures. With the help of the Creator and the Watchers, Noah painstakingly built the ark but offended the king Tubal-cain, who was Cain's descendant, by refusing to accept him and his people on the ark when they came seeking for refuge. Tubal-cain vowed to seek vengeance on Noah and this very much summed up what the rest of the movie was about.

Noah was portrayed as a staunch believer of the Creator and he was fixated with building the ark and doing what he felt was necessary, including sacrificing the innocent and killing, to carry out the Creator's orders at all costs. But his conviction was tested and he wavered when he was forced to decide whether to take the lives of the newborn twins, from his eldest son Shem and daughter-in-law Ila.

This movie was banned in some countries because of its religious content, which was fictitiously controversial to some religions. I, for one, just enjoyed this movie as what it is - a movie.

Noah, his wife, Ham and Leo

Migration of the snakes to the Ark

Animals migration to the Ark before the pivotal flash floods

Ray Winstone as the evil King Tubal-cain

PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS

Following the success of the 2010 movie "Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief" where Uma Thurman played the unforgettable Medusa, the sequel was finally released 3 years later with the same cast starring Logan Lerman, Douglas Smith, Jake Abel, Alexandra Daddario and so on.

This time round, Percy and his team had to find the golden fleece in order to restore the life of the magical tree that created the shield that protected the camp of half-bloods from any outside invasion and to save Mount Olympus from being destroyed by Luke. Here Percy was united with his half-brother, who was actually a cyclops.

Along the way, they took a ride on a magical creature Hippocampus, which is the scientific genus of the seahorse.

Overall, I wasn't quite thrilled by this movie although there were some bit parts that I liked.

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER

I too watched this coming-of-age movie about 2 weeks back but I was too lazy to post about it.

The 3 main leads are Logan Lerman, whom I remember from "Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief", the household known Emma Watson, from the Harry Potter movies, and Erza Miller, who is an unknown to me.

This is a movie where Emma Watson tried very hard to get out of the shadow of Hermione to play a different role Sam to remind the audience that she is not only capable of being in the Harry Potter movies but can be a character actress to take on larger and more serious roles.

Logan, on the other hand, played the main character Charlie effortlessly and brilliantly to portray a nervous and self-conscious teenager with a mysterious past. There was no semblance of the confident and sociable half-god half-human Percy Jackson at all.

The movie explored the relationships between the three characters and their close-knit friends and how they dealt with the angst and tribulations of growing up, amidst grappling with teenage love, homosexuality, child molestation, suicidal issues. However, despite all the hardships and suffering they went through, the message was clear that they still had youth on their side. Such is the consolation of being a youth in these days.

So did I enjoy the movie? Well, it wasn't the kind that would seriously appeal to me though and that's my answer.

PROMETHEUS

So is "Prometheus" the prequel to the 1979 movie "Alien" by the same Director Ridley Scott? I think so.

Starring Noomi Rapace, the original actress in the movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo",  Michael Fassbender of "X-Men First Class" fame, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green and Charlize Theron, who was most recently seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman", it was a controversial movie that explored the origin of man and appeared to bridge the missing links to the alien movie. I feel a movie is just a movie and should not be taken too seriously since it is usually made more for entertainment than anything else.


At the start, it probably showed how mankind was created from the DNA of a humanoid alien. Fast forward to a futuristic 2089 when archaeological digs at various continents unearthed similar star maps pointing to a series of planets. Four years later in 2093, a team of 17 members on board a spaceship were gathered together to explore a distant planet which points to the origin of everything. The expedition was fraught with lots of unknown e.g. row of gigantic structures in a clearing, cylinders with a black oozing substance, decapitated alien corpse, as two crew members succumbed to violent deaths inflicted on them by the alien beings. They referred to the aliens as engineers because of their supposed creation of mankind.


The movie was kind of slow at first as the team was formed and picked up pace about one hour into it. Noomi was the lead protagonist Dr Elizabeth Shaw and her foetal abortion by caesarian was actually quite gross. Michael as the android was cold, calculated and brilliantly mechanical in his movements. I was disappointed with the role that Charlize played because it was sadly insignificant. She is so talented and her acting ability was all wasted here.


Subsequently, a surviving alien was revived by the team and it turned on them, killing most of the members. The remaining survivors discovered that the aliens were bent on destroying their creation and despatched their spaceship to go to Earth to decimate the human race. To prevent the impending war, some of them sacrificed their lives to prevent the alien spaceship from taking off into the sky. 


Of course in the end, the brutal engineer was killed but In the process, a new alien form, similar to the one in the "alien" movies was created. The only survivor, on board the Prometheus, Dr Elizabeth Shaw recorded a message log as she escaped from the planet in one of the alien's spaceship. In fact, this message sounded familiar as if I have heard it before in one of the alien movies. That is probably the connection between this latest movie and the earlier ones.