While its rejiggered title is surely an improvement on
Babylon Babies, the novel upon which Mathieu Kassovitz sci-fi epic is based,
Babylon A.D. is indeed as much of a disaster as its
director recently admitted. A mishmash of earlier epics like
Terminator,
The Fifth Element and
Children of Men combined with the broadest, stupidest and least gratifying storytelling conventions possible,
Babylon A.D. counts as yet another failure in Fox's expanding repertoire of clunkers and serves as more or less official confirmation that Vin Diesel's tough-guy shtick ran out of gas the minute anyone actually knew the musclebound actor by name.
Diesel plays Toorop, a retired mercenary lured back into service by Gorsky (Gerard Depardieu) to shepherd a young girl named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) from Russia to America. Constantly defending himself from various attackers - including Aurora's protective guardian Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh) - Toorop soon realizes that the girl possesses strange powers that must be saved at any cost. But when her estranged parents show up at the rendezvous, each trying to recover her for themselves, Toorop is forced to decide what's more valuable - his fee for transporting the girl, or the life he may destroy by turning her over to his employers.
As mentioned above, French director Kassiovitz himself has decried the theatrical cut of
Babylon A.D., and watching the film it's easy to understand why: whole chunks of plot, much less their explanation, have clearly been excised. That isn't to say that what's left is incomprehensible in the sense that audiences won't be aware of who's doing what and why; each character telegraphs his or her behavior, and then deconstructs it verbally to make sure we understand exactly why. But there are a great many digressive plot developments and lines of dialogue that sort of pass as if they were at one time important, but no longer serve a purpose in the story.
What with the film's references to cloned tigers and reconstructive surgery and invasive procedures that can record memories, there was probably a fairly sophisticated political and social commentary in Kassiovitz' original script. But reading that subtext would require an actual text on the surface, and there isn't one, unless you count the moronically simple action set pieces and the monosyllabic exchanges that link them together. (Even the character's names sound as if they've been reduced to their most basic phonetic components - Toorop, Gorsky, etc. - so that people won't have to think too hard about who's who.)
08-29-2008, 07:02 PM
Babylon A.D
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