Babylon A.D.: A Movie Review  

By John Lobell 

While 2001: A Space Odyssey can be regarded as the origin of the modern visionary movie, The Matrix is the origin of the contemporary “luminous transcendent” movie.

It is a genre that freaks the critics, with its deaths and resurrections, virgin births, and suggestions that human beings are capable of manifesting something beyond their material existence. The critics fear dreaded Christianity sneaking back into our culture (recall the critical snickering at this aspect of The Matrix, and the total freakout that a lion could come back to life in The Chronicles of Narnia). But with even a little bit of mythological awareness, the critics would know that these themes predate Christianity by thousands of years and are present in just about every tradition, literate or otherwise. 

Miraculous birth. A girl is born by parthenogenesis: that is, the mother divides in two; nothing difficult here. But what about a boy infant; where does he come from? Here we are faced with a discontinuity. And death and resurrection? This is one of the themes of shamanism, the ur-foundation of all religions. Death to the ordinary and birth to transcendence. This is a common practice of the plains Indian warriors. It is one thing to reject the claims of exclusivity for these experiences by the high religions, but it is going too far to deny them altogether, and despite the efforts of the establishment to do so, they keep cropping up. 

Unfortunately, unlike The Matrix, Mathieu Kassovitz’s Babylon A.D. has been so compromised by clunky writing and forced cuts (he now declares that the version currently being shown in theaters is “pure violence and stupidity”) that we will have to wait for the director’s cut on DVD to see the story as it was intended. 

These themes, apparently, fly so high over the heads (dare we say “souls”?) of the critics, that they either have no idea what they are watching, or are so intimidated by the genre of “luminously transcendent” movies that they are impelled to immediately trash it–on Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, the consensus on Babylon A.D. is that it is “a poorly constructed, derivative sci-fi stinker with a weak script and poor action sequences.” 

So let’s make a little sense, shall we, for the reviewers: 

The central theme of the film is also found in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, in which we are presented with the image of the lunar Queen of the Night, against which the solar, rational father competes for the woman and man of the present and their children of the future. Nothing earth shattering here, but one of those basic mythic archetypes that defines us. 

In Babylon A.D., Dr. Newton (Joel Kirby), a scientist working with artificial intelligence who is able to resurrect the dead by merging them with machines, pairs up with the High Priestess (Charlotte Rampling) to create a girl named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) who is endowed with transcendent powers. Oh, and one other thing: she is about to give virgin birth to twins. The two compete for control over the girl: Dr. Newton to build his technological future, and the High Priestess to construct her world religion. 

Thoorop (Vin Diesel), the mercenary hired to retrieve her, has been thoroughly brutalized by the dystopic near future, and seeks eventually to return to the upstate farm of his parents (think of Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle, but with a happy ending). 

The movie plays like a tone poem which unfolds the plight of these characters and their themes, with the technology of the solar father favored over the religion of the lunar mother. The simple human act of bringing forth the next generation (think Vin Diesel’s The Pacifier), however, prevails in the end, and Thoorop, now dressed in white, raises the (perhaps super) kids in exurbia. 

How good/bad is this movie? It is, admittedly, underdeveloped. Whereas it took The Matrix three movies to flesh out these kinds of themes, and Star Wars six movies, Blade Runner managed to do it elegantly with one film. 

Ideally, the director should have told us more about the background of Dr. Newton (love those names) and his technology, as was accomplished so well in the recent Iron Man. The human-machine interface has a long history going back to the mythological deed of Cadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth (according to McLuhan, the dragon’s teeth represent the phonetic alphabet, the first threatening medium), and is present in Leonardo’s dream of an all-destroying robot (we now know that Leonardo built an actual programmed robot). 

The High Priestess and her religion should also have been more developed. Recall Chancellor Palpatine’s slow and deliberate morphing into The Emperor in the Star Wars prequels. 

Thoorop (Vin Diesel) is the most rounded character, and his redemption (hanging up his guns, which Shane was not able to do in the classic western, and which still eludes Wolverine), is a major theme of the movie. Yet we don’t feel as satisfied as we should, which is something attributable to awkward screen writing, since there is nothing to fault in Vin Diesel’s acting. Let’s hope that a poor box office performance here as with The Chronicles of Riddick (one of the great movies playing out the themes of the Chinese classic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) does not keep him from making more of these kinds of movies. 

And of course, let’s hope for more development in the eventual director’s cut version on DVD. 

Overall, Babylon A.D. contains profound themes elaborated in classic American action style, so what are the critics complaining about? Perhaps, as so often before, they have unconsciously colluded to exile difficult thematic material and protect the rest of us from the impact of “luminous transcendence.”

Why Steven Spielberg’s Underrated 2004 film The Terminal is Worth a Second Look

By John David Ebert

A recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s 2004 comedy The Terminal with Tom Hanks inspired me to write a brief retroactive review, since I realized just how rich with significance this film is. At first glance, its premise of a man who falls through the bureacratic cracks to take up his residence at J.F.K. Airport in New York sounds as though it may have been vaguely inspired by J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, which retells the story of Robinson Crusoe as a man who drives his car off an overpass and becomes stranded in the midst of a clover leaf of expressways proceeds to make a living for himself as a refugee of post-industrial society. However, when one realizes that the film was actually (loosely) based on the real life story of an Iranian man (Mehran Karimi Nasseri) who lived in Terminal One at Charles De Gaulle Airport in France for nearly twenty years (1998-2006), one begins to realize that Ballard’s novel was actually prescient of a coming situation: the fate of a newly emerging class of post-industrial nomads who cannot find a suitable place for themselves in a world of airports, freeways and office buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Clone Wars: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

And so after insisting that he would never make another Star Wars film, George Lucas has now given us a seventh Star Wars film.

I would like to point out that I saw this film on a Saturday night at eight o’clock, on the film’s opening weekend, and was surprised to find the auditorium largely empty. There were maybe twenty or twenty five other people in the theater, and after the film began, several of the audience members, twentyish looking, walked out. For a Star Wars film, this was a first. I have never been to the opening of a Star Wars movie that wasn’t swarming with eager, enthusiastic people, most of them twenty year olds. And it struck me as a little odd that the film’s cartoonish sensibilities offended the twenty year olds who got up and walked out (one can mentally supply their dialogue: “Dude, this is stupid, let’s get outta here”) since the twenty year olds of today mostly read graphic novels, play video games and collect action figures. Read the rest of this entry »

 The X-Files and the Breakdown of Our Cultural Immune System

By John David Ebert

1.

By now, Mulder and Scully have become almost as famous as their literary prototypes Holmes and Watson. Indeed, in many ways, they strongly resemble this earlier pair of detectives who stand at the threshold of the birth of the forensic genre. Watson, like Scully, was also trained as a medical doctor, and Holmes, like Mulder, was the man of genius for whom solutions to any given mystery would come in a flash of intuition like a revelation from the gods, leaving a bewildered Watson struggling to keep up. But unlike Watson, Scully normally offers an alternative explanation for the given mystery, one that, she typically boasts, is based upon a scientific and rational view of the world. In this respect, she resembles Holmes rather more than Watson, for Holmes was bent upon sterilizing the grimy streets of Victorian London of its human bacterial infections of irrationalism and emotionalism, whereas Mulder applies his intellect to the task of bringing demons and devils, rather than bacteria, into focus.

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The Dark Knight: A Review

By John David Ebert 

Nowadays, after the events of 9/11, the Oklahoma city bombing, the Unabomber and even the AUM Shunryuku nerve gas attack on Tokyo subways in the mid 1990s, we take our villains seriously, because we are well aware that there are a number of disquieted souls out there who wish to destroy Western capitalist society. The creators of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, likewise, take their villains very seriously, and seem also to be aware that animosity toward our megalopolises and the consumer mentality which they support is alive and well. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewing an archetypal movie, by John Lobell

Myths are a repository of the structures and mores of a culture, a suprapsychology, a system of principles describing the nature and workings of being, the universe, society, and individual development. Movies have become a dominant artistic form in our culture, and are therefore a major vehicle for the presentation of our myths.

The prime myth of Wanted, as of many action movies, is Percival, the story of one of the knights of King Arthur’s Roundtable. A sub myth is the search for the father. While the search for the father is found in the myths of many cultures, the themes of the Arthurian Romances are unique to the European culture which began around 1,100 with these tales and with the laying down of the Western temple form, the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.

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The Incredible Hulk: A Review

By John David Ebert

In a way, Marvel’s new Hulk movie is not so much a sequel to Ang Lee’s earlier (and much better) film about one of their most famous comicbook characters as it is a remake of the first movie, for it tells exactly the same story, and does so with little imagination or attempt at varying the theme. In the new movie, as in the Ang Lee film, the Hulk spends most of the narrative fighting the American military, and then ends up at the climax fighting another bizarre supervillain created as a misbegotten child of a science experiment gone awry. The storyline, then, is formulaic and so one wonders what the motives of the film’s makers could have been in constructing a new movie with different cast members but with exactly the same premiss. The lack of imagination demonstrated here by the filmmakers reminds one of the old Hulk television shows, for television, especially of the 1970s variety, was once virtually synonymous with the phrase ‘lack of imagination.’ Today’s television, however, with shows like HBO’s Deadwood and Rome or Showtime’s Weeds has gone way beyond this old stereotype toward the creation of some really interesting and inventive narratives. Marvel’s new movie, unfortunately, belongs in the dustbin with the old television shows of the 1970s.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls: A Review

By John David Ebert

The original Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, had concerned the descent of a solar hero — hence, his antipathy to snakes, for snakes are usually lunar — into the underworld of Egyptian civilization in order to retrieve from the sunken depths of our perceptual field the Ark of the Covenant, the central fetish around which the Hebraic tradition had revolved. The significance of the retrieval was precisely that it was a religious object that had to be restored and brought into the field of focus of our modern, secular society, since the religious object becomes pars pro toto for the religious experience as a whole. It is precisely a sense of communion with the divine which we moderns have lost, and it was the goal of the first film to retrieve this lost experience as a way of bringing it to our attention and making the point that contact with a spirit world is indeed what we have lost in the building of modernity.

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Iron Man: A Review

By John David Ebert

In ancient mythology, blacksmith heroes are normally devious, crafty, morally ambiguous figures who cannot be trusted. Their creations are often faulty and sometimes redound fatally upon their users. Worse, they are often murderers. The name of Cain, for instance, who committed the world’s first murder in Biblical mythology, means “smith” and Tubal-cain later became the world’s first worker in bronze and metallurgy. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a man who was chased out of the city of Athens for murdering his cousin Talos, of whom Daedalus was jealous since Talos was said to have invented the first saw after being inspired by finding the jawbone of a snake. In Scandinavian myth, Volund the smith was imprisoned on an island and hamstrung by a king who wished to prevent him from escaping so that he could use Volund’s talents for the making of weapons, but the crafty smith murdered the king’s two young sons and transformed their skulls into bowls and their eyeballs into jewels which he sent to the king as “gifts” before inventing wings and flying away from his island prison. Ancient societies seem to have been well aware of the warping effects of technology on the human personality. Read the rest of this entry »

A Response to John Ebert’s Review of Cloverfield

By William Irwin Thompson

As always, John, an interesting spin on the ordinary.  Yes, catastrophes are coming our way, which is why I feature them so strongly in my essay on “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.” 

But another point is that our culture has been kept in arrested development by the media at the stage of the 13 year old–the age of the comic book for my generation–witness the recent acne outburst of comic book movies.  The 13 year old is not a child and is not yet an adult capable of dealing with threats.  So it imagines itself to be a superhero in the same way Piaget once noted that 13 year olds generate life histories of fame for themselves and already see their statues up in the park.  So the superhero is a preteen mythic unconscious projection. Read the rest of this entry »