Review of Babylon (2022) by Jluis_001 — 21 Jan 2023

Call it excess of ambition or excess of self-confidence, but Chazelle has filled his film about Hollywood debauchery with precisely that, but nothing of substance in between.

But like I've said many times, even failure has its own degrees, but don't get me wrong, I don't think Babylon is a failure in any shape or form, but I do think it should be the project that should teach him the lesson he failed to learn from the lukewarm reception of First Man.

And what I mean by that is that it doesn't matter if you already have an Oscar for directing and that you obviously think your talent is huge, that doesn't mean that you should do it just because you can.

Because even though I support a director who pushes expectations and makes things an average filmmaker wouldn't be allowed to do within the studios' system, Chazelle isn't breaking any boundaries or exploring any new territory.

He's not inventing or discovering anything with his new film. So he did fail in that department.

Babylon is a good film, I can't call it anything else. There is too much care and attention in its making to say anything of the sort.

It is a love letter from the director to that era, but that also makes it more of a project for him than for a wider audience.

I enjoyed it, even with what I didn't like. Its 3 hour running time is excessive by any standard. The performances are good, but nothing extraordinary. The actors perform well for the type of film they're in, but fall far short of leaving a memorable impression.

The truth is that Babylon's strengths lie in its direction and production values. It's a great piece of spectacle when it needs to be, even if its story is too thin for what it's trying to encapsulate.

Of course, Babylon is worth seeing, but Chazelle's ambition clearly got the better of him, because I will reiterate that I did like the film, but at no point did it dazzle me, and that's exactly what it was trying to do.