This is the year cinema gets Biblical again.

Later, we will see Christian Bale as Moses, leading the Israelites to the Promised Land in Ridley Scott's Exodus; but first comes Russell Crowe as Darren Aronofsky's Noah, giving his paired-up passengers a ticket to ride out the deluge. It will be interesting when we are able to compare the two films. Scott is a down-to-earth director accustomed to large-scale stories, and one would expect Exodus to be cut from the same cloth as the Biblical epics of the 1950s, such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. Aronofsky tends to be more driven by theme, and more provocative.

That said, while Noah has generated controversy with religious groups, it is nothing compared to the furore caused by Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ, whose interpretation of the New Testament was indisputably challenging. With Noah, the objections feel like a storm in a teacup. The director has definitely taken liberties with Genesis, turning the Noah story into an environmentalist riot act. But the Bible should not be immune to artistic licence.

Whatever his New Age leanings and fantasy embellishments, Aronofsky's tenet is the same - mankind is washed from the earth for its sins. And the result is an extremely watchable curiosity. As you would expect from the man who made ballet the subject of a horror movie for Black Swan, it is idiosyncratic and strange, powerful in places, misguided in others, all the while driven by one of Crowe's most purposeful performances.

After an animated recap of creation and the Cain and Abel story, the director stamps his agenda with the pitting of Old Testament man against the environment. We first see Noah as a boy, whose father is a saintly fellow training the lad to take from the earth only what he needs. But he is a lone voice and killed for his beliefs. Years later, the grown Noah is preaching the same ethos to his own sons, while studiously avoiding men altogether.

Noah, his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and sons live a bleak existence in a scorched landscape, which is about to become even more inhospitable as "the Creator" (God is never mentioned by name) appears in a vision and reveals his intentions. Noah's father Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) gives his son a little narcotic inspiration to help him understand what he must do.

Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Hendel do not balk at their extrapolations, with mixed results. The living stone creatures who conveniently assist in the building of the ark may be based on the Nephilim, the fallen angels of Genesis, but are just plain daft, lending the film an unwelcome touch of The Lord Of The Rings. And while Ray Winstone's warmongering descendent of Cain, who will do anything for a berth, adds an edge to the thesis that man's hubris and cruelty has led to his undoing, the character's development is the stuff of action movies, not Biblical drama.

The most rewarding departure from scripture sees two of Noah's sons without wives, and Noah's determination that after the flood humanity must die with his family. The subsequent family tensions, with Connelly and Crowe rekindling the chemistry they shared in A Beautiful Mind, are emotionally searing, with Crowe convincingly charting a twinkle-eyed, benign man's descent into near-madness.

Visually the film is as variable as the storytelling. Noah's visions are suitably terrifying, even more so his formative, nocturnal sortie into the human camp, whose debauchery and violence evoke Hieronymus Bosch. But the CGI animals are underwhelming, as is the flood itself; ironically, in focusing on the human storm within the apocalypse, Aronofsky has short-changed nature.