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As has been noted elsewhere, Babylon A.D. The future courier/bodyguard story is one that we have seen in other works like Cyborg (1989), Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Children of Men (2006). You are certainly drawn into Mathieu Kassovitz’s vision of the future – a burned-out Russia where people live in shantytowns designer backgrounds and vehicles, including airliners that are painted to promote Coke Zero littered Cyberpunk gadgetry in the background, notably Vin Diesel’s nifty digital map and the arrival at New York City, which is sort of like a low rent Blade Runner (1982) future with skyscraper-sized commercials, ads laser-projected onto the sky and cabs with exterior digital displays. The first few scenes are classic Cyberpunk – Vin Diesel walking through rundown shantytowns in some future Russia, negotiating to buy what looks like the carcass of a cat in a market, returning to his apartment to cook it and then sit down to eat, before a troupe of heavily armed mercenaries burst in, to which Vin reacts with indifferent cool, before erupting into action to kill and settle a score with the leader of the group and then surrendering to the others. There is an attention grabbingly showoffish opening shot where Kassovitz’s camera zooms all the way down from in orbit around the Earth into extreme closeup on Vin Diesel’s eye in which we see a reflected explosion, before his narration throughout the scene ends with the announcement: “Too bad today was the day I died.” In fact, I suspect I actually enjoyed it somewhat more than Mathieu Kassovitz did.
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is serviceable and certainly watchable film. Vin Diesel passes through the streets of a Cyberpunk future ” The studio did little to promote Babylon A.D., opening it without critics’ previews – despite which it went to the top of the box-office charts on its opening weekend. Kassovitz went so far as to call the finished film “like a bad episode of 24. was completed, the studio cut his original version of the film from 161 minutes down to 101 for European release and by a further ten minutes when it came to the US release. He claimed that 20th Century Fox had interfered throughout shooting and even dictated the way that he shoot scenes. Mathieu Kassovitz was vocal in interviews about his dissatisfaction with the finished film. accrued a degree of controversy even before it opened. Kassovitz subsequently went onto make the historical film Rebellion (2011), although appears to have fallen silent since then.īabylon A.D. Babylon A.D., Mathieu Kassovitz’s sixth feature film, was a venture into Cyberpunk cinema.
#BABYLON A.D SERIAL#
Since then, Kassovitz has frequently dabbled in genre films with the likes of The Crimson Rivers (2000), a serial killer thriller that develops out into a plot about Nazi eugenics programs, and then headed to the US to make the Halle Berry ghost story Gothika (2003) for Dark Castle. In recent years we have seen other French Cyberpunk outings with the likes of Banlieue 13 (2004), Immortal (ad vitam) (2004), Renaissance (2006) and Chrysalis (2007).įrench director Mathieu Kassovitz emerged out of nowhere with his second film La Haine (1995), concerning itself with violence in French minority neighbourhoods.
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One of the most influential films appears to increasingly have been Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) whose fusion of Cyberpunk action and vision of a messianic teen waif certainly informs Babylon A.D. France may well be one of the few countries that are keeping Cyberpunk cinema alive.