Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Babylon A.D.

Our movie reviews here at the WalrusFile are going to be a little bit different. It’s so expensive to go to a first-run movie these days that I know that there are a lot of people like me who decide to wait, either to rent the DVD or order it from Netflix or, like I usually do, go see the movies once they arrive at the discount theater down the street. But there’s a lot of choices, so we’ll try and weed out the duds.

Babylon A.D. is the most completely nonsensical movie I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t mean it’s weird, though it is, or that it’s brainless, though it’s usually that too. I mean it literally makes no sense. I could use words to describe the plot to you, but they would be meaningless. We are given a series of vaguely interesting pieces here, but there is little to no explanation of how they fit together. That said, there are redeeming qualities here. The movie is entertaining. We’re given a halfway interesting vision of a sort of coherent future (well, visually coherent, anyway). And Vin Diesel is always good for a laugh.

We are shown a brutal mercenary. A girl with the brain of a computer (which somehow means she’s psychic) who may be carrying a “viral bomb.” A nun who knows kung fu. An insane cage fighter (“He is a lost soul”). A crazy scarred boss guy (Gerard Depardieu!) in a tank limousine. Televisions that “you can’t turn off, but you can change the channel.” A vaguely creepy religion. Biker gangs with heat-seeking missiles. Drone aircraft set to blow up refugees. A virgin pregnancy (with multiracial twins!). Computer systems that read your memories by temporarily killing you. Moving robotic walls. “Double Clone” Siberian Tigers. Bombs going off with zero explanation (more than one!). Sexual tension out of absolutely nowhere. And, most especially, Vin Diesel doing a back flip over a missile with a snowmobile. I’m forgetting a lot here.

The basic story is that Vin Diesel (whose character, I think, is named “Toorop”) has to transport this girl named Aurora who has supposedly spent her entire life at a convent in Kyrgyzstan to New York, along with a nun played by Taiwanese actress Michelle Yeoh. This is a fairly standard Sci-Fi plot, actually. But the explanations of the hows and whys that we’re given are what make this all extra trippy. It’s set in a sort of “this goes on” future, chaotic and overpopulated, overrun with refugees, with video screens and advertisements on every available surface. Global warming is mentioned but we don’t really see the effects. The special effects are convincing, especially the gleaming ultra-city of New York. There’s a nice joke when they’re flying on an airliner and we pull back to see “Coke Zero” written on the side in huge letters. At least I think it’s a joke. It could be extremely ham-fisted product placement. And no, the title has no relation that I can see to anything in the movie… except, I suppose, that it does theoretically take place after the birth of Christ.

This movie’s pedigree is, somewhat randomly, mostly French. It has a French director, Mathieu Kassovitz, a French actress playing Aurora (meaning her dialogue often slips into incomprehensibility), and it’s based on a French Sci-Fi novel called Babylon Babies. In a few places it’s reminiscent of that far superior, far more joyous French Sci-Fi classic in English, The Fifth Element. A few places. But in place of garish color everywhere we have black and metal gray, and in place of plucky Bruce Willis we have Vin Diesel, who is not asked to show a single emotion for the entire film. And that’s why this is definitely a dollar movie.