We saw the trailers for this movie a couple of times. It looked like a sci-fi thriller and we're just suckers for science fiction. I did not recognize anything in the trailer that indicated that this movie was based on a book I'd read 2 years ago called Babylon Babies. Before we went to the movies I looked the movie up on imdb.com and read the synopsis. It immediately rang a bell. The book was a hard read. It concerned a war-weary mercenary named Toorop (played by Diesel in the film) in a future war-weary world. Toorop is hired to bring a young woman from Central Aisa to Montreal (New York in the movie). The girl is harboring some secret A killer virus is suspected through most of the book but in fact she's carrying genetically modified twins (that's the babies part of the title, I never did figure out the Babylon part). Along the way, Toorop perhaps gets some sort of salvation while protecting the girl, loosing the girl and finding her again. And there is lots of psuedo religion mixed in for good measure. The movie is more a straight forward action movie with basically the same plot but minus most of the deeper and confusing aspects of the book (and I still don't understand the Babylon part of the title, and the AD makes no sense either). The movie was not pre-screened for critics which is usually a bad sign. I looked up reviews on rottentomatoes.com and most were bad. We actually thought it was entertaining but I won't recommend it. It's not bad like I thought Hellboy II was bad or like I thought the new Mummy was bad. Those movies I actually didn't enjoy much. I won't recommend Babylon AD because the movie was completely pointless. Lots of entertaining (by which I mean action scenes, things blowing up, fights, etc) but you're never quite clear why. And the movie has one of the worst endings I've ever seen.And one more thing. When I'm putting together these little movie reviews, I like to go to the official movie web site to get a picture. Usually these sites have wallpaper for download. This movie's web site was about the worst I've seen. All I could figure out to do on it was to watch one of three trailers.
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I read something about this movie. Apparently the director is NOT at all happy with it. The studio pretty much took it and cut it down into a 90 minute pointless crapfest.
The director, Mathieu Kassovitz (probably best know in the US for his role in Munich) seemed so pissed off that I'm surprised his name is still attached. I thought the film might end up with "Alan Smithee" as director.
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