Rayting:
5.6/
10 93.4K votes
Language: English | Russian
Release date: 25 September 2008
Veteran turned mercenary Toorop takes the high risk job of escorting a woman from Russia to America. Little does he know that she is host to an organism that a cult wants to harvest in order to produce a genetically modified Messiah.
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User Reviews
I should say first that I don't know the book this movie is adapted from, so I just mean to give an opinion on the movie itself and the way it's handled.
Director Mathieu Kassovitz has been in the business for a while now and is a well complete actor as well and still something about this project went wrong. The story itself seems solid - and somewhat I can imagine the book being just great - but the movie looks rushed with only the most important and visual parts shown.
Actually, it's a kind of annoying experience as you can see how really good it could have been if they only did a better job on the background and the storytelling instead of mixing everything from the book in an action packed movie. Now being totally honest, the action isn't great at all thanks to the shaky hand cam effect (The Bourne Legacy I guess ...) and uninspired choreography. Same goes for the acting : Depardieu and Wilson are easily the worst : they would have read the script for the first time it wouldn't have surprise me.
Considering all the good material it certainly feels like a misproduction, someone said the director and actor Vin Diesel were having different opinions and I do hope the latter won because if Kassovitz did it the way he wanted I'd be really disappointed.
We've been awarded with such great movies around the same kind of subject (Children of Men to name one) that this one seems pale compared to those.
Fmovies: Considering the problems reported with this production I thought the film wasn't all that bad. Sure, some of the dialogue was hokey, but I'd like to see a director's cut. That way perhaps it might help support the director's claims, or it might suggest otherwise. The location's were great and some of the ideas were interesting. When will studio knobs learn stop meddling. Unless there are really serious and legitimate problems they should stay the hell out of the director's way. The IMDb says the budget for this film was $60 million. Interfering has helped ensure that it's unlikely to break even. Maybe on DVD it might. I'd watch a sequel, provided Vin is in it.
Toorop is a "bad-ass" who does things in line with his chosen lifestyle. When he is "approached" by the shadowy but powerful Gorsky to transport a girl from his home in Russia across into New York (where he is wanted on charges) he accepts the job. He collects the angelic Aurora from an ancient monastery along with her guardian, Sister Rebeka and the journey begins. Many are the dangers ahead but soon Toorop realises that the greatest danger may be Aurora herself.
This film got roundly bad reviews and, if you manage to make it through 90 minutes then you will find out for yourself why that was the case – it is not something that the film hides from view. With any sort of "full world" sci-fi, the risk is always that your design of that world will make it look ridiculous and also lack any sort of logic as to why things would be that way. There is an element of that here but the bigger problem is much tighter to the core of the film – the story itself. The vast majority of the film is a journey where the dangers and the stakes are increasing at each step. We don't learn a lot as we go but for me there was enough to keep me going because I wanted to see where it was going. However as it reaches a point where things should start coming together and the "bigger picture" take over the narrative flow from all the running and shouting that it has been for the majority, well, well then it just falls apart.
Except "fall apart" is not the best description for it because really what happens is that it becomes incredibly tangled. Last week I had the pleasure of using two sets of tweezers and a very bright light to untangle a tiny silver necklace belonging to my partner – no part of it stood out as different, it took a lot of work to make sense of the different parts of this massive knotted ball of a chain and it took me ages to translate that knot into a chain again. I mention this because in a way this film is the same by the end because just where you want it to be coming together in a big way, all that happens is it becomes more knotted and more nonsensical. Sadly there is nobody working to make it anything other than this and the closest thing to a "chain" that we end up with is a horrible ending that feels like the makers holding their hands up and saying "Look, I think we all agree that we should probably just bring this whole thing to a close without any fuss and all go our separate ways. Sorry". Some who love this film (and there are some – there are always some) will explain it to you and help you see what you missed; this is never an easy conversation because even those defending the film have to work with their tweezers and such to pull sense out of it. And once they do – once you and I understand the plot and more or less what was going on, we will still be left with one undeniable fact – we still don't care.
Caring is the problem that occurs due to the terrible narrative. At the start I was interested as I was just starting out but, the more it went on, the less I cared. It didn't engage me or give me reasons to keep being interested and by the time the awful ending came round I simply didn't care enough to be angry by how little closure it gives the story. I'm not sure where the fault lies but I suspect it should be evenly spread. The script is poor and the delivery of that script is poor. The cast must have seen something better than I did because there are some solid names in here – certainly it wasn't a ma
Babylon A.D. fmovies. I fortunately watched Babylon A.D. first from the net and it seems it was (unfortunately) the wiser thing to do because it was the longer cut! Babylon A.D. is not a bad movie even with the 90 minute version but it lacks heavily what the longer cut offers.
I was mostly disappointed (therefore rating 6 which would've been 8++ something otherwise) about the ending of the shorter version which really sucks if you have seen the other one (i did think that here in Europe they would automatically release the 160 min version but no..). Money wasted on that 'cos I was not expecting this kind of cut.
Nevertheless I still enjoyed the plot, the visuals and the very stylized world what this movie brought to the table. The action scenes were also enjoyable. Hopefully Hopefully the better version will be released on DVD! Shame on you studios for not giving this movie the respect it deserves!
It was decent. The action sequences were definitely a bit choppy, especially the first one. Also, there were a few times when I had to go "Is that even physically possible?" and the ending left a few loose ends still left, so I was sort of disappointed with that.
If you don't pay attention, you will hate this movie. It moves fairly quickly, so once you miss something, it's gone and you will be lost. So pay attention. The story is actually pretty good and actually feels down to earth, which is more than I can say about quite a few sci-fi movies.
For the record, I went into this movie not expecting much more than average, and I was slightly surprised. If you go in expecting the next academy award winner, you will completely despise it. It is no Dark Knight, so don't expect it to be. There's not much there artistically, so, if you don't like a movie simply trying to be entertaining for the sake of being entertaining, then you won't like this one. All in all, it was a good watch, not entirely worth the price for a new movie, so I suggest waiting until it comes to the cheaper theaters (if you have one near by).
As another note (and I'll probably get some heat for this) I actually enjoy Vin Diesel as an actor. This is not his best performance, but it's certainly not his worst (even though I still moderately enjoyed Chronicles of Riddick, I admit it was pretty bad and to this day I still don't know why I like it.) I think Diesel is good at what he does, although he really hasn't been in anything that really blows me away, even my favorite Diesel film (Pitch Black) wasn't completely stunning, but it was really good. With that in mind, this is a Vin Diesel movie, so, if you're not like me and you don't like Diesel, you will not like this movie and should just steer clear of it.
Wow. I didn't have high expectation, but thought I'd at least enjoy Babylon AD. I like just about anything science fiction and most B movies. Babylon AD seriously got the Homer Simpson treatment which I explain later in my review.
The setting is the world in ruins after nuclear war. Vin Diesel comes in as the anti-hero, terrorist hired to deliver a "package" to the US. Enter Michelle Yeoh as the protector and chaperone to the package. She's excellent in her role as a nun in a seemingly peaceful cult spouting lines such as, "just because we are peaceful, doesn't mean we are weak." There are some nifty special effects and enough mystery at the beginning to make me believe the film is going to get 7 stars.
Except for some futuristic technology, that's about it for the good parts of the film.
As for the bad parts, have you ever seen The Simpsons episode with Mel Gibson? The last half hour of Babylon AD is treated like Homer Simpson's version of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I'm not kidding. It was shockingly bad and truly follows Homer's vision.
I'm still not quite sure what point the movie was trying to make. The story becomes so muddled and the acting is so bad at times that I had no idea what was going on. About 3/4 through the movie, one of the most awkward sexual tension scenes is thrown in for the hell of it. There's no build to it and it makes absolutely no sense, which unfortunately becomes the recurring theme until the end.