Darren Aronofsky is a master of maximizing impact with a small budget, mostly through effective and clever stylistic tricks that highlight the allegorical and symbolic nature of his work. Pi was a harsh, eccentric, singular vision with an almost demented energy that was compelling even if the story felt incoherent in places. The Fountain shares Pi's eccentricity, but it is stylistically its opposite: lush, dreamy rather than nightmarish, highly allegorical, romantic. Noah seems to be reaching into the same box of symbols on a far more epic scale, but the results, as presented in the trailer, are troubling.
In Aronofsky's version of the Old Testament fable, Noah is a rugged white man played by Russell Crowe. It's dangerous to cast Crowe in movies because, while he has proven he can be a fine actor, in recent films his presence is so strong that it's impossible to forget that he is Russell Crowe. (This was a huge problem in Les Miserables. The whole time you're just thinking, that's Russell fucking Crowe! Trying to sing!) It makes the trailer hard to watch with a straight face. That's not the only dissonant element though: there's the fact that all characters shown in the trailer are white, and the women are appropriately beautiful -- with nice long clean styled hair and plucked eyebrows.
Perhaps even more troubling is that the central conflict shown in the trailer is between Noah, who is ordained by God as the super special chosen one, and all those other people, who are Evil and deserve to die. The way the trailer sets up this conflict mirrors the capitalist narrative that some people are just better than others and so deserve rewards (like, getting to survive the storm) while others are clearly undeserving and therefore there is no moral problem with leaving them to die.
Aronofsky has stated that he is imagining this film as a parable about environmental destruction. That, too, is problemtatic, in that there is a strain of radical environmentalists (like Sheri Tepper, for example) who believe that having "undesirables" (whom Tepper defines as, among other populations, the mentally ill and the criminal) die off so that the world can be less populated and therefore a better place. The way this trailer presents the theme is uncomfortably close to that sort of twisted utopianism that, just as capitalism does, places more value on certain lives than on others.
If we view the trailer as the product of the tension between Paramount's wanting to appeal to Christians and making their money back, and Aronofsky's wanting to explore Noah as a "dark, complicated character" reimagined as "the first environmentalist", we can clearly see ideologies at odds. The trailer hints at what an ambiguous, uncertain film the final project could become.