Movie Review

Kim and I were recovering from a wild and woolly Easter weekend on Sunday and sat down to enjoy the highly acclaimed movie Babel described with the plot outline as: "Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families."

I expected something a bit more... dramatic I guess is the word. It was interesting but for the most part sanguine. I never felt terribly invested in any of the characters more than a bit and whenever I began to get into the story of a particular character the scene shifts.

I guess I expected more interlocking stories as in Pulp Fiction where the stories actually, you know, interlocked. In Babel the stories kick each other off like balls on a billiards table, striking once and never meeting again. It was unsatisfying.

In the end I felt there was no message, no conclusion, no powerful story. A woman got shot, she lived. The other stories were for the most part similarly empty of content or closure except for the Moroccan family who gets torn apart in all the confusion.

While interesting in its contrasts, the movie was not gripping. I give it 2 stars out of 5.