"Babel" demands a lot of energy from the viewer but it doesn't even try to return the favor. I found it exhausting and depressing and painfully meaningless: Three stories that don't seem connected at first glance basically end up staying that way...there's merely small references here and there that supposedly bind them together, but sadly there's no real point to even portraying any of these 3 stories in the first place. They are merely sad segments of different people's lives in different situations...a sarcastic "wow".
It can easily be compared to "Crash": you have similar storytelling and a similar concept of different lives that change dramatically in a specific moment in time, so the ending intentionally doesn't make any conclusions and doesn't answer questions...that's left to us. So far so good. But "Crash" I think had something to say, whereas "Babel" struggles to scrap its content.
I couldn't have cared less for any of the characters and I was glad when the charade was over (I was constantly skipping through the .torrent file as well). "Babel" can't really be labeled a bad film but it's a poor man's "Crash" or "21 grams" (sorry, haven't seen "Amores Perros" yet) wannabe.
It can easily be compared to "Crash": you have similar storytelling and a similar concept of different lives that change dramatically in a specific moment in time, so the ending intentionally doesn't make any conclusions and doesn't answer questions...that's left to us. So far so good. But "Crash" I think had something to say, whereas "Babel" struggles to scrap its content.
I couldn't have cared less for any of the characters and I was glad when the charade was over (I was constantly skipping through the .torrent file as well). "Babel" can't really be labeled a bad film but it's a poor man's "Crash" or "21 grams" (sorry, haven't seen "Amores Perros" yet) wannabe.