Babylon A.D. - Vin Diesel

My brain must have slipped a gear yesterday afternoon: I offered to go grocery shopping with my wife. Madness. As a reward for my suffering I rented a Sci-Fi video that I had noticed at the store the other day. Vin Diesel may not be the greatest actor, but he suits me: he knows when to keep his mouth shut. Kind of like Clint that way.

The movie is supposed to be set in the future, but it really doesn't look too much different from today: perpetual low intensity conflicts, gangs, random violence. When they get to the end of the movie they pull in some stuff that is way out there, but hey, we've already seen the basic story, so if they want to tag this stuff on to the end, that's fine.

There are a couple of things that were pretty well done. One was the high-speed train across Siberia. On the outside it is reminiscent of the French TGV and the armored Soviet trains from a James Bond movie. On the inside it is like any train in a third world country: cramped, dirty, farm animals, cooking, etc. One scene has the train crossing a bridge that has been built over what I imagine is a nuclear bomb crater. No explanation given. Just the way things are.

Another was the refugees scrambling to get aboard an old Soviet nuclear submarine that has just surfaced through the ice. There was a little more artistic license taken here. (I am pretty sure) there is only one manhole in the top of the conning tower, so it doesn't make much sense to drape a net over the side so lots of people can clamber up. You can still only get one at a time down the hatch. But who knows? Maybe people can go down quicker than they can climb up, so the net would actually work by keeping the inbound queue full.

There was a scene of Vin skinning, butchering, cooking and eating a rabbit. I thought that was a fine scene. They didn't go in for a lot of gore, but you got the idea. There was also a shot of a dead dog hanging from something. Once again, no explanation, just part of the scenery.

I won't say anything about the car and helicopter except that it was a clever play on words. I don't think there was a single car chase, though there was a clever shot of a tiny taxi crossing three lanes of busy traffic, but that was just normal taxi operation.

Then we had the snowmobiles zooming across the frozen wastes while trying to avoid destruction by automated drones. Funny thing about automated weapons. If you become a target within their design parameters, you're done for. But if you fall outside the design parameters, machines are just stupid and easy to avoid. Determining just where those limits are is the most dangerous part of the job. In this film, the hero performs some heroic stunts (naturally) of incredible timing and luck and manages to destroy the lethal drones. The stunts are kind of fun to watch, but they are basically unbelievable. If the machines were really that deadly, the hero would be dead. If the machines are stupid, he wouldn't have had any trouble with them and there would have been no need for heroic acrobatics. But, hey, it's a movie, what do you want?

The last thing we had was person specific missiles. We had these a few years ago in another movie starring Tom Selleck, and they were bullets, not missiles. But the same idea. It is programmed to seek out a specific individual. You can point it any which way and it will fly around till it locates the target and then home in on them. Back then it was a little fanciful. Now it is a little more believable.

There is also the big fist fight, and the big gun fight. The gun fight looked like what you might expect from a bunch of punks. Not very professional. But hey, lots of bullets and lots of bodies. I guess that's the effect they wanted, and that's what they got.

Michelle Yeoh acquitted herself admirably in the fight scenes. She was taking the bad guys out left, right and center.

The DVD had two versions of the movie, one on each side. One side was the theatrical release, the other had the unrated version. I Googled a bit to try and determine which one I should watch. I found some quibbling over details, the unrated version is longer, and one person who said the unrated version is better, so I went with the unrated version.