It’s no exaggeration to say that as action stars go, Vin Diesel was one of the biggest of the early 2000s. After his starring role as Dominic Toretto in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious and 2002’s XXX, Diesel appeared in a number of other action films, such as The Chronicles of Riddick. However, while the decade cemented Diesel’s stardom, there’s one movie from the era that not only failed at the box office but performed abysmally with critics and not only is it streaming for free on Tubi this month, but it’s also a film worth revisiting.
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Released in 2008, Babylon A.D. was directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. Based on the 1999 novel Babylon Babies, the film saw Diesel star as a mercenary in a dystopian near future who is given the job of smuggling a superintelligent young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) out of Eurasia to New York City, a journey that has them dealing with gangsters, cultists and more, a journey challenged as Aurora reveals her strange, supernatural powers. It’s a movie that, on paper, sounds like it would be an exciting story and it is; it’s just not without its flaws.
Babylon A.D. Is a Bit of a Mess (But The Performances and Action Scenes are Worth the Watch)
What makes Babylon A.D. such an interesting and unusual film is that the critical and box office response isn’t exactly wrong but that also doesn’t mean there aren’t redeeming qualities to the film. Kassovitz was notoriously unhappy with the film and ultimately disowned it, claiming that the studio, 20th Century Fox, had interfered with it during production and as a result the film didn’t turn out the way he had actually envisioned it. The filmmaker even notably described the finished movie as a “bad episode of 24”. And there is merit to that complaint. The film features some pretty rough writing and feels badly constructed at various points, particularly in that the film never really seems to quite land on exactly the type of sci-if action film it wants to be. There is a lot going on in Babylon A.D., thematically and while one moment you might be watching a straight on action film, the next you’re watching a dystopian satire with religious commentary and somehow no connection between the two elements.
That said, the film’s messiness belies a lot more detail than you might expect. There are some real, big swing questions being asked by Babylon A.D., specifically about ethics about engineering humanity and religious manipulation of “miracles” for their own purposes. Keeping those big swings from completely missing is the performances. Diesel isn’t the only star in this film as it also features Michelle Yeoh and while this is well before she got her much-deserved appreciation thanks to Everything Everywhere All At Once, she shines in this film. There is also some insane action; that’s almost a requirement when you have a movie starring both Yeoh and Diesel.
Ultimately, the film sits at a 7% on Rotten Tomatoes, but with the film available on streaming, it’s much easier to look back and see that that number doesn’t really tell the true tale. Babylon A.D. is definitely not without flaws—and if you’re looking for a sort of “rescue” trope in sci-fi that also has significant social commentary, you can certainly find other movies that have done it better—it’s actually an interesting movie. It’s wildly ambitious, but that’s part of its charm and it is worth checking out this month on Tubi.
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