'Babylon' (2022) Movie Review: Pure Ambition

Babylon is a movie written and directed by Damien Chazelle (First Man) starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt.

Babylon is a movie which from its failure in the box office recalls the echoes of Intolerance (1915), in which they built those sets with elephants that were so grandiose, in a film making style of another era and an impossible dream, disconcerting, ambitious and almost orgiastic spirit.

About the Movie

Babylon captures all of this spirit from a grandiose production which did not convince the more traditional audience.

This movie tries to reconstruct the chaos experienced in the first Hollywood times, the arrival of sound, the excesses, disconcerting situations and the fight to not wake up from an impossible dream and, in some way, reconstruct that lost Babylon that the creator of modern cinema, David Wark Griffith tried to find too.

This is a movie with a stellar cast (Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt no less) in which the director, screenwriter and creator´s hand is more evident than the acting of its stars in this production’s brutal chaos with luxuries in which each scene is a marvel, and even so, did not convince in its structure because…

It does not attempt to do so at any time and this is a matter of choice. This movie isn´t orderly and it cannot be so because its goal is to portray a chaotic life in a system that, miraculously, things worked almost miraculously.

A nostalgic movie for movie fans and exaggeratedly burlesque for those who like familiar movies that are easy to watch.

An excess of drugs, alcohol and extravagant characters who converged in that first Hollywood, perhaps the most marvelous one or perhaps only a mythological construction that, with the passing of time, turns its own burlesque myth into reality.

Babylon is above all, excess and a penchant for excess: there is nothing to object about this.

This is a baroque movie if there ever was one, marvelously sprawling which unfortunately, didn´t gel with the mass viewers because in some way, it is a movie about a time that has already passed and, as opposed to what its budget dictates, was not created to be a mass media production in a time in which what is politicially correct sets the pace.

Our Opinion

Brilliant technically speaking and coherent in its depth-form: it narrates chaos through chaos. And this irritates lovers of stories that are orderly, clean and correct.

An incorrect movie that is born in times that are falsely “correct”.

Created somehow, to last.

A tribute to the best kind of movies for a Hollywood that was a dream and which remains as a legend.

Release Date

December 23, 2023.

Where to Watch Babylon

Theaters

Director

Damien Sayre Chazelle (born January 19, 1985) is a French-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is known for directing the films Whiplash (2014), La La Land (2016), First Man (2018), and Babylon (2022).

For Whiplash, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His biggest commercial success came with La La Land, which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning six including Best Director, making him the youngest person to win the award at age 32. He made his television debut directing the Netflix limited series The Eddy (2020).