Babel |
France / Canada • 1999 • 95m •
   • Directed by: Gérard Pullicino. • Starring: Mitchell David Rothpan, Maria de Medeiros, Tchéky Karyo, Michel Jonasz, Bronwen Booth, Sheena Larkin, Garry Robbins, Maxim Roy, Mark Camacho, Nagui, Maggie Castle, Dino Tosques, Frank Fontaine. • Music by: Gérard Pullicino, Ken Worth.      The Babels are a strange breed of four-foot-tall creatures who once co-existed happily with the human race. But when they built the huge tower of Babel to taunt God, God became angry and drove them underground while scattering the humans to all the four corners of the world. The year 2000, three Babels are forced to recruit the help of a young boy whose father has found the map leading to the powerfull Babel Stone. For a new Tower of Babel has been build and unless the stone can be kept save from the evil Nemrod, all life on Earth will seize to exist.
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Review:
Set in 1999, we meet a lonely, 10-year-old boy (Mitchell David Rothpan) whose mother died just months after his birth. The introverted lad communicates rarely with his father and sister and never with his dad's lover. His best friend is a miniature TV that is always on. In other words, he's the archetype of the young reluctant hero who, through accident and circumstance, has to emerge from his mental hibernation to take action. The boy is sucked into the underworld lives of a group of Babels, those furballs (short, hairy things that look like country cousins of Ewoks from the Star Wars movies) live at the core of the Earth under a blue tree with 10 branches and are supposed to protect the planet from the ravages of the weather and the stupidity of mankind.
Babel is a well-intentioned effort, but like the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from which it draws its inspiration, it's a gaggle of too many labourers. The three screenwriters have tried to pack in enough mythology for a children's television series, let alone a 90-minute feature. Director Gerard Pullicino has taken pains to make the villains pure caricatures, presumably to alert the young viewers that they are not to invest too much fear into their response. Instead they are meant to laugh at the bumbling antics of the dwarfish Babels, who are a cross between wise munchkins and The Three Stooges.
The movie plays with general themes, such as the emptiness of lives based on power lust, but does so in such comic-book fashion that it drowns its own moral lessons. It indulges its audiences with special effects eye-candy, making it look like a video game.
Review by Unknown from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database