Babylon, A.D.

Just a few musings after seeing the movie today. Vin Diesel doing what he does good – action: check. Massive explosions: check. Lots of action and high chase scenes: check. Beautiful damsels in distress: check. So what’s the catch?

Nothing, really. The story doesn’t hand you everything with a spoon, you have to figure some stuff out for yourself – which is good, because it doesn’t treat the viewer as a retard.

It asked some interesting questions. At one stage the girl says, regarding second generation cloned Siberian tigers:
Aurora: “Did God make them?”
Vin: “No, man made them.”
Aurora: “But man is made in the image of God, therefore, isn’t everything that man makes the will of God?”

The movie goes on to prove that, in fact, the answer is no, seeing that Aurora herself is an experiment of a crazy woman desperately trying to start a “bona fide religion” (wtf?) and trying to prove it with…wait for it…a virgin birth! Yep. Oh, and a doctor who did experiments on babies, but fell in love with his daughter when she was born and send her away to some Christian-Asian convent where Vin picks her up to take her to the States.

Although Vin says at some point that God doesn’t have anything to do with their situation, we do see him say grace before he eats his cooked dog (I kid you not) at the beginning of the movie. Pass your own judgment.

What did bother me, was the product-placement in the film, which was really ridiculous. We see the Coke bottle-sign like it is currently…yet it is so far past 2017 (when the tigers got extinct) that a second generation of tigers have been cloned??? And the plane they take to New York…is branded in Coke Zero????? I mean, come on! And nothing against them, but Marriott is still the “income specialists”?? Really, who are the producers trying to fool here? Maybe they just got a big sponsorship from Coca-Cola. I hope the actors got a lot of free Coca-Cola. I would have demanded my share.

Not bad. You have to figure a few things out at the end for yourself as well. So, you use your brain (mostly) in a Vin Diesel-actioner. So it is not bad, but it is nothing more than this…