Desperate for something—anything—worthwhile to say about the inert lump of postapocalyptic tedium that is Babylon A.D., film critics the world round have taken to comparing it unfavorably with Alfonso Cuaron’s crazily overrated 2006 futuristic thriller Children of Men.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The protagonist of Children of Men (Clive Owen) is a disaffected bureaucrat coerced by a shadowy resistance group into smuggling a young pregnant woman out of a totalitarian England torn by terrorism and civil conflict, while his counterpart in Babylon A.D. (Diesel) is a disaffected mercenary manipulated by a shadowy religious order into smuggling a young pregnant woman out of a totalitarian Europe torn by terrorism and civil conflict. In Children of Men the expectant party is the first woman on earth to conceive a child in decades; in Babylon A.D. she’s carrying genetically enhanced twins who represent some kind of messianic second chance for humankind. In both films, the equation of the mother-to-be with the Virgin Mary is driven home with the subtlety of a railroad spike to the forehead.
The source for Children of Men is a 1992 novel of the same name by British writer P.D. James, who took her title from a line in Psalm 90: “Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.” A devout Anglican, James has referred to her book as a “Christian fable,” and its religious message is blunt enough to make C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series look like so many gnostic mystery texts. In James’s hands the global infertility plague is both a divine punishment for Western moral decay and an allegory for the evils of sex as recreation. Lest the reader miss her intended slap at the secular “culture of death,” she tips her hand early in chapter one: “Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life, had increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children. It seemed at the time a welcome development in a world grossly polluted by over-population.”
The signal-to-noise ratio of the novel being as low as it is, it’s no surprise the movie turned out to be a mindless blob of cineplex fodder whose rock-bottom worst moments coincide with its flirtations with Deeper Meaning. There’s an entertaining irony in that director Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine, Gothika) undertook his five-year project of adapting Dantec’s novel as a labor of love, out of admiration for its intellectual content. Though Kassovitz caused a minor media sensation last week by repudiating his own film on the eve of its release, he did so in terms that raise serious doubts that he was ever on Dantec’s wavelength in the first place. “The movie,” he complained to an interviewer from AMC’s Sci-Fi Scanner blog, “is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet”—pretty much the same moral Cuaron and company imposed on Children of Men.
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
Adapted by Eric Besnard from a novel by Maurice G. Dantec
