Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't deserve the hatred -- and probably no more than a rental., January 7, 2009
Much like The Spirit, a poorly-written, all-over-the-map misinterpretation of Will Eisner's character, complete with entertaining performances and stunning visuals, Babylon A.D. is a confusing, occasionally dry, very familiar mess with some strong performances and stunning visuals in service of a fairly engaging story. It is not, by any means, a great film. It is also not, by any means, a disaster. I noted that Babylon A.D. has one one-star rating on here, and I think the movie deserves better. I saw the film in theaters, and I was reasonably entertained up until the last five minutes. Not even The Spirit completely lived up to that standard.
When films like this come along, I wonder how many people tune out once they've seen a few things they don't like. I am a glass-half-full person. Hundreds of films come out every year, and 90% of them probably have merits that people simply ignore because it's easier to attack the things about them that aren't as sharp. Sure, it borrows from Blade Runner. Movies borrow from other movies. If this was automatically a strike against a film, Quentin Tarantino would have no fans. I personally think Vin Diesel is a fairly charismatic actor (see his recent effort Find Me Guilty for evidence of this), and yet it's like he's got a target on his head. I'm sure some people decided they didn't like this movie just on the basis that he's in it.
The "Unrated and Raw" presentation on DVD does not work miracles on the film. Numerous internet sources claim varying degrees of footage was altered or chopped out of the film, ranging from 15 minutes (since the theatrical cut ran 90m and this runs 103, that's about 15) all the way up to a towering 70m. Admittedly, this ending makes a LOT more sense (which is to say, any sense) than the theatrical ending, although, with apologies to director Mathieu Kassovitz, I liked the hummer chase, presented as a deleted scene on the 2-disc DVD (not to mention in the version without the chase, one set of antagonists just gives up, apparently).
For some reason, it's apparently easy to forget that the scale goes from one to five, and the three stars in the middle are more than padding for the first and last ones. I've seen movies that aren't even always in focus. Certainly a movie can become terrible long before it starts to fail on a technical level, but Babylon A.D. is not one of those movies. It's perfectly OKAY, and that's something that deserves some more credit.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the director's cut is finally coherent, January 8, 2009
I as everyone else was very confused by the fragmented end of this film as presented in its theatrical release. The uncut version puts most of the missing pieces back together and everything works elegantly.
The ideas and performances are extraordinary ... and the visual effects are exceptionally well done.
It's initially about a deception that is redirected into an ambitious effort to do something exotic with mankind.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Could have been much better., June 1, 2009
Babylon A.D. / B001KMB6YG
*Spoilers*
I'm not really sure what happened here. Vin Diesel does mindless action, and does it well, and here is no exception - whatever flaws "Babylon A.D." has, they are not his fault. Nor are they the fault of Michelle Yeoh who carries herself (as always) superbly, leaving the viewer to wonder why, exactly, Yeoh keeps showing up in particularly flat action movies (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Widescreen) leaps to mind) when she really is so much better than that and has proven it time and time again. Either there's still some kind of "White Actresses Only" rule barring Yeoh from the better movies, or she has a really terrible agent. Anyway.
Sometimes you can just tell when a movie is based off of a science fiction story you haven't been exposed to. "Babylon A.D." is definitely one of those movies - sure enough, the opening credits note a sci-fi story that may or may not be obscure, but which I definitely haven't read yet. A lot of the standard sci-fi fare is here: much of the world's animals have died out, and have been replaced by clones; America is a closed-borders super-power where a high standard of living is possible for the wealthy, but the rest of the world flounders in deep poverty and warfare; genetic modification of humans is the way to the future. Etc.
Into all this steps Vin Diesel, a conscientious mercenary given a second chance to re-enter America, if only he will deliver a sheltered teenager (and her adoptive mother, Yeoh) along the way. Vin Diesel is only too happy to comply, although he is understandably spooked by the sleepy-eyed girl he's been given charge of. When the girl starts displaying uncanny abilities, such as a near-psychic understanding of the immediate future, an ability to speak multiple languages fluently, and intimate knowledge of the controls of a derelict submarine, he recognizes that there's something a bit off about the young lady and - suspects - that she might be carrying a terrorist-created virus. If so, he vows to murder the girl before she can be 'activated', although this doesn't make much sense because (mind you, I'm not a biologist) it seems like that wouldn't necessarily neutralize the danger.
Anyway, that doesn't matter, because it turns out the girl is *really* a genetically modified human with 'the brain of a computer' and she's been impregnated with twins (apparently during a brief doctor's visit prior to the start of the movie) who are 'powerful' even in the womb, yet in a completely undefined sense. The girl's "mother" - the leader of a cult who commissioned her birth in the hope that this new messiah/madonna would bring in a few more converts - plans to kidnap the girl and...well, it's not exactly clear what she plans to do with her. Use her as a P.R. device, apparently, but it's not clear why Vin Diesel feels compelled to save her from this fate. For that matter, it's exceedingly creepy to see the young lady come on to Vin Diesel, given that he's getting at that age where he could probably be her father and, besides, his entire role in the movie up to her attempted seduction is a paternal one, not a romantic one. It would seem that Hollywood no longer knows how to portray a Man and a Woman without insisting that they "Find Twue Luv".
Despite serious differences in age and genetics, Vin Diesel realizes that he does love the girl and saves her from a non-specific fate that might be bad, but might not be. And then, because the movie was getting a bit longish, we immediately jump to the epilogue where we find that our Computer-Brain Girl was only designed to bear children and nothing more (why? how?) and she has spent the entire pregnancy in a coma (which we all know is just wonderful for fetal development, good grief), and once she delivers (in the quietest delivery ever), she will die and leave the infants in Vin Diesel's capable hands, where he will protect them from...what? Being used for evil, perhaps, although it's unclear how the children could be useful for anything more than the average human baby. This is left out, however, either because they were hoping for a sequel or - more likely - because they ran out of budget.
"Babylon A.D" suffers simultaneously from too much exposition and not enough of it. Huge swaths of dialogue are devoted to heart-to-heart conversations between Vin Diesel and Yeoh while they hash out that the girl is really super special and important - really! - without the viewer ever understanding *why* the girl is useful nor *why* her children are important or powerful or even where they came from. The result is that there is far too little mindless action (because we have to talk about Special! Computer! Girl!) for this to be a proper action flick, and yet far too little pertinent exposition for this to be a proper science fiction film. Since much of the movie feels sloppy and poorly edited, I expect that the whole thing was filmed with a proper amount of action and exposition and then someone with poor editing kung fu took out the relevant dialogue and left in the moody, introspective stuff.
It is possible that familiarity with the source material is just a necessity for proper viewing of this movie, however, I tend to feel that a movie should be able to stand on its own without needing "pre-reading" on the part of the viewer. In that sense, "Babylon A.D." fails, and I don't particularly recommend it as anything more than a mindless adult-protects-precocious-child-through-scifi-explosions movie, and if you want to watch something like that, at least Ultraviolet (Unrated, Extended Cut) has vampires. I'm just saying.
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