I found that it's a pleasant science-fiction movie. Probably, it's cultural. I watched "Southland Tales" and "Babylon A.D." back to back - I fail to understand how "Southland Tales" could even remotely have better ratings, but for some reason it has. Every flaw you can find in Babylon, is about ten times worse in "Southland Tales". I found that interesting.…Full Review »
Jake
9
All I can say to all the negative reviews of this movie is this: There are most certainly worse movies in all aspects. While some events in the film were a bit confusing, the plot did make you think, and also left you to draw some conclusions for yourself rather than spelling everything out for you, which I find very refreshing. Additionally, I found the action to be, at worst, different, and at best, pretty cool.…Full Review »
Babylon A.D. is Vin Diesel’s entire career in microcosm. He starts out as a gritty, amoral, selfish murderer a la Pitch Black, gets in a few c car chases, pulls off some X-Games stunts, attempts some dramatic stuff which never really works, gets all sci-fi with confusing futuristic plot exposition, and by the end he’s morphed into The Pacifier, a glorified babysitter who has given up his guns for polo shirts and awkwardness with kids. As with every recent Vin Diesel project, when the credits roll, you’ll kick yourself for having been suckered into watching yet another one of his crummy movies.
The one thing all bad Vin Diesel movies have in common is that the film’s problems are never actually his fault. Vin delivers his usual solid, gruff performance in Babylon A.D., but the movie doesn’t deserve him. The film’s director Mathieu Kassovitz has already come out and blamed this disaster on studio interference, and that may be the case. I’m not here to assign blame though, simply to review what shows up on screen. What we have here is a mess.
It starts well enough, with Vin wandering around in a near-future Eastern Europe which looks a lot like the 80s near-future Detroit from Robocop. Vin is a mercenary named Toorop, hired to smuggle a girl named Aurora and her nun caretaker Rebeka into America. The set off through Russia, planning to sneak across the Bering Straight into Canada, even though the Bering Straight connects Russia to Alaska. Perhaps in the future Alaska has been conquered by the Canucks, there’s no real explanation for that or most of the sillier conceits going on in the movie. Even with its completely inconsistent characters, Babylon A.D. might have been sort of fun. In fact it is, for the first 40 or 50 minutes. There’s some mildly entertaining action sequences, done with average stunts and practical effects. It feels like you’re watching a particularly well executed episode of post apocalyptic thriller on the Sci Fi channel. At some point though, the fun stops and it becomes such a total mess that all you can do is laugh at it. The movie has no idea how to wrap things up and even worse, no idea how to explain any of what’s been going on. There’s some mumbo jumbo about virgin births which never amounts to anything, and some vague allusions to a cultish, corporate religion, but not enough explanation to connect the dots between any of it. I still have no idea why we were following around most of the people in this movie, and I don’t know that the actors in it do either. If they don’t know what they’re doing, then it’s doubtful you will. Don’t bother buying a ticket.…Full Review »
