Babylon A.D. TK
Different as they are in tone and execution (Children of Men is an art-house number chockablock with topflight acting talent like Julianne Moore and Michael Caine, Babylon A.D. is a Vin Diesel vehicle full of ho-hum pyrotechnics and CGI-enhanced derring-do), they’ve indeed got more in common than art direction conforming to industry standards set by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner over a quarter century ago.
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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.
Oddly, the makeover imposed on James’s novel went unremarked upon even by critics who claimed to prefer it to the movie. One observer who did notice was Watergate conspirator-turned-evangelist Charles Colson, who complained on his blog that “it’s just like somebody set out to make a movie of Adam Smith’s famous The Wealth of Nations and wound up making instead Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.”
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