Babylon AD Review

Vin Diesel, queerly named Toorop in this bleak futuristic story, is the mercenary reluctantly transporting a young woman Aurora [Melanie Thierry] and her loyal guardian, a nun [Michelle Yeoh] with an expertise in martial arts! Toorop escorts these two women as they travel from chaotic Russia to the Promised Land - New York. During the course of the movie we, along with Toorop, discover that Aurora is pregnant with twins who are of utmost spiritual significance, and hence there are battalions of people that Toorop and the nun have to fight before they reach New York.

The movie starts off with some rather disturbing and sombre imagery of the world in the future - hopeless and weary - reminiscent of the Children of Men. But just as you get set to be blown away with something as profound, the storyline starts to twist and turn, and confuse you. Coming from Mathieu Kassovitz, director of La Haine, the lucid urban melodrama and Gothika, a contorted horror flick, it does not surprise us that his visuals for the script at hand are quite out of the ordinary. Not exactly extraordinary, but not repulsive either.

Babylon AD is not a movie that would bore you, but it could certainly tire you. Kassovitz takes us through long endless minutes of chases on land and underwater - against fierce fighters and rains of bullets. And then, all of a sudden, the movie ends. Just when you think Kassovitz was about to explain what exactly is the spiritual significance of the unborn twins - are they carriers of religious truths or something else - the movie comes to a close. An open ending, you could say.