Kernel Rating (out of 5): 
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Length: 138 minutes
Age Appropriate For: 15+. The film is PG-13, but there’s some darker stuff and questions about faith that may not be grasped by younger audiences. The tale of the Ark includes a fair amount of violence—there’s a battle beforehand, there are some monsters, there are lots of corpses and people who die because of the flood—and later on there’s the threat of infanticide. Also some sexual innuendo and discussion of whether a young woman can have a baby, some nudity, and some cursing.
‘Noah’ is not necessarily the anti-religion movie that some critics have made it out to be during the controversial lead-up to the film’s release. It’s more existential than that, but it’s also perhaps too ambitious—and meandering—for its own good.
By Roxana Hadadi
The controversy regarding director Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic “Noah” has been somewhat inescapable lately, hasn’t it? It’s been talked about on cable news shows, it’s been popping up in newspaper articles; everyone is in a hubbub about whether the movie makes Noah a crazy environmentalist or a crazy zealot or just plain crazy. But ultimately Aronofsky is not giving us a straight adaptation of the story of Noah and the Ark; he’s interested in more existential and humanistic things than that. And that’s both the film’s ambition and its downfall.
