Synopsis
If You Want to be Understood...Listen
Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.
2006 Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.
Brad Pitt Cate Blanchett Gael García Bernal Koji Yakusho Adriana Barraza Rinko Kikuchi Said Tarchani Boubker Ait El Caid Elle Fanning Nathan Gamble Mohamed Akhzam Peter Wight Abdelkader Bara Mustapha Rachidi Driss Roukhe Clifton Collins Jr. Robert Esquivel Michael Peña Yuko Murata Satoshi Nikaido Harriet Walter Michael Maloney Dermot Crowley Trevor Martin Aaron D. Spears Alex Jennings Matyelok Gibbs Claudine Acs Jamie McBride Show All…
Gerardo Albarrán Joel Proust Cedric Proust Younes Afroukh Tomás Guzmán Alfredo Ramírez Adrián Rivera Oliver Ignacio Arteaga Cortez
火線交錯, 巴别塔, Вавилон, 바벨, バベル, بابل, Babil, Bábel, 通天塔, בבל, Βαβέλ, Bābele, Babelis, Tháp Babel, 巴別塔, ბაბილონი, อาชญากรรม / ความหวัง / การสูญเสีย
A film about language and communication would normally grab my interest immediately. For the better part of this film the sheer quality and topics of most of the separate stories managed to do just that. There is enough to enjoy here, with strong performances and interesting subjects.
It is, however, also infuriatingly moronic in its contrived and forced narrative link. It makes a capital mistake in that it feels the incessant need to 'mean something'. It does so by force feeding us a link that is supposed to give the separate stories a common meaning/purpose. What it fails to recognise is that the stories by themselves manage to bring across the commonality just fine, keeping the uniqueness of their narrative and clearly distinct feel.
It is extremely annoying that in its attempt to please its audience and naive need to tie up loose ends it fails to see the quality that is already there.
From the director of Amores Perros & 21 Grams, Babel is the third & final chapter of Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's Trilogy of Death which once again employs the multiple-narratives structure interconnected by a single event, further explores the prevalent themes of the last two chapters while adding a few more & features captivating performances from its much more diverse cast to finish the trilogy on an admirable note.
Set in 3 different countries & interweaving 4 distinct plot lines, the story of Babel is triggered by a rifle bought by a Moroccan herder whose sons, while testing it, end up wounding an American woman who was vacationing there with her husband. When the two are unable to return home on time, their children's caretaker…
Babel:
- A bunch of stories that intertwine
- Great acting
- Great directing
- Writing is precise and smooth
- The script makes people sound like real people
- Works well as an ensemble piece
Crash:
- A bunch of stories that intertwine
- Fine acting
- Horrible directing
- Writing is messy and doesn’t make sense
- The script is blatantly racist and no one sounds like a real person
- Does not work well as an ensemble piece
Pretty sure you get the point
hi and welcome to the museum of movie kisses! our first exhibit is: the kiss brad pitt gives cate blanchett while she pees in a pan
Well over two hours of tedious misery porn all for some surface level message about communication. Attempts to go against the tourist or 'othering' gaze but inevitably ends up playing up cultural stereotypes, particularly in the Japanese segment which had the most ridiculous and tenuous connection to the overarching plot, existing solely to drag this monotonous dreck out far longer than necessary.
What a load of wank. Babel adds up to nothing. Stuff happens, but nothing really happens, and it all means nothing. I would have called it pretentious wank but it's so empty I don't even think it's trying to say something.
Alejandro González Iñárritu is a technical master as a director, but that simply isn't enough. His stripped back debut, Amores Perros, is easily his best work that I've seen. Yet in Babel his wizardry serves no purpose. The entire structure is artificial, and not in a way that adds value since it's meant to be a film of simple humanity. There's two great set pieces, one at a US-Mexico border crossing and another when a group of Japanese teenagers…
Watched on Netflix
How Amelia walks through the desert with the children in her red evening dress, the deaf Chieko drags herself depressed through the night, crowds of people and illuminated streets of Tokyo, the two Berber brothers lie in the wind on wide hills in the middle of the mountains, looking back on the moments before it happened, or Richard breaks into tears on the phone in front of his little son, always then Iñárritu hits me right in the heart. Amelia finally puts it into words towards the end: "I'm not bad, I just did something stupid".
This is exactly how I feel and experience the whole film again and again. Nobody wants to do something bad here,…
iñárritu further proving himself 2 be the master of crafting obnoxious, contrived af pieces of white elephant art by making something straight out of the farhadi school of radical "empathy" (read: having every character act as unreasonable as possible under the guise of investigating the human condition, when it's just an excuse to progress rote drama) instead of trying to examine how these events are triggered from the failures of neo-liberal international institutions. but that would actually take some level of formal talent beyond "have people shouting and crying and play some sad music; humanism."