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Damien Chazelle is obsessed with the punishing pursuit of perfection. Whether it's finding an immaculate tempo, hurtling into space, or making it big in Hollywood, his films feature characters who are willing to endure physical and emotional torture to reach the finish line. If " La La Land " was his wide-eyed, sentimental look at the movie machine, "Babylon" feels like a very intentional counter to the criticisms of that film. It's a lavish 1920s-period piece about how often the silver screen images that feel like magic are really the product of incredibly hard work, broken dreams, and a lot of luck. Multiple sequences in "Babylon" detail how much work goes into two seconds of film, whether it's a field of dozens of extras sitting around while a camera is obtained or the difficult perfection needed when recording sound. Those two excellent scenes remind us that none of this is easy, even if it all looks so much fun.

Is it all worth it? That's the tough question. Chazelle gives lip service to the idea that this version of landing on the moon is worth the trip, but he drags his characters and the viewers through so much misanthropy to get there that it's hard to believe him. "Babylon" is a film of stunning parts—both individual scenes, performances, and tech elements—but it feels like the magic touch that Chazelle needed to pull them together in an honest way eludes him. There's something to be said about a film being so robustly unapologetic, but I felt as manipulated and deluded as the outsiders in this film who are eaten up by the Hollywood machine by the time it was over. One might argue that's intentional—a "feel bad" Hollywood movie is rare—but it's the difference between pulling back a curtain and simply rubbing your face in elephant shit.

And that's how "Babylon" opens, introducing us to Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican American in the city of angels at the end of the silent film era. He's trying to get an elephant to an insane Hollywood party, the kind of drug- and sex-fueled affair that was only whispered about in the gossip rags of the time. Chazelle uses the orgiastic bacchanal to introduce his players, including an aspiring actress perfectly named Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ), who catches Manny's eye just as her star is about to rise. We also meet the suave Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star about to leave his third wife and be struck by the fickle finger of fame as talkies come into the picture and the wheel turns to a new era of stars. There's a jazz trumpet player named Sidney ( Jovan Adepo ) and the underwritten role of a cabaret singer named Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ). Gossip journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ) writes about it all while recognizable faces like Lukas Haas , Olivia Wilde , Spike Jonze , Jeff Garlin , and even Flea flirt on the edges of the story.

It's an undeniably ace ensemble, led by another fearless turn from Robbie and a star-making one from Calva, but Pitt is the stand-out, conveying a sense of lost glory that sometimes feels almost personal. Pitt has been a star for over 30 years—he's seen legends like Jack Conrad come and go, and he imbues his performance with a relatable melancholy that gives the entire film depth that it could have used in a few more places.

Chazelle's ambitious tapestry approach focuses on the ascending arcs of the outsiders—Manny, Sidney, and Nellie don't understand they're part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the films (maybe less). Even the star Jack Conrad will discover how disposable legends can be. All of them become power players in their own way—Nellie holds the screen in a way that few actresses other than Robbie could convey convincingly; Sidney's musical talent ascends as sound takes over the silents; Manny is clearly one of the smarter people on a set, and that grants him an increasing number of decisions. There's an underdeveloped love story between Manny and Nellie, but this film is more about the love of movies and Hollywood history than romance. It is also loaded with an overwhelming blend of historical detail and urban legends. Chazelle clearly did his homework.

And, once again, it feels like the filmmaker's commitment elevated his team of craftspeople. Linus Sandgren's fluid cinematography gives the film a lot of its momentum—his shots are rarely flashy but always propulsive. Justin Hurwitz's score might be the best of the year, finding recurring themes for its characters that gives the entire piece more of a sense of opera—a connection that fits this story's dark tone and tragic endings. The production design straddles that line between feeling genuine and also larger than life at the same time. The intercutting of the stories sometimes feels like it gets away from the excellent editor Tom Cross , but that's more a product of Chazelle's occasionally unfocused script than anything in the editing room.

About that script. "Babylon" is a test of whether or not a film can be the sum of its gorgeous pieces. A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of "Babylon" that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes. A film like "Babylon" can be aggressively bitter and contemptuous, but I found it hypocritical when it tries to play the "isn't it all worth it" card that everyone knows is coming in the final scenes. Fans of this film seem to be adoring this finale, but it struck me as the falsest material in Chazelle's career.

There's a sense that Chazelle is suggesting that we don't get " Singin' in the Rain " if lives aren't destroyed during the transition from silent to talkies, and isn't it great that we got that movie ? That's a deeply cynical and superficial way to look at filmmaking. If he thinks he's pulling back the curtain on a broken industry, he reveals himself to be a part of that warped system in the end. It's like he doesn't want to seriously consider how his beloved art will destroy its dreamers as long as his raging party keeps going.

Available only in theaters on December 23rd. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Babylon (2022)

Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.

189 minutes

Diego Calva as Manny Torres

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy

Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad

Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Jean Smart as Elinor St. John

Tobey Maguire as James McKay

J.C. Currais as Truck Driver

Jimmy Ortega as Elephant Wrangler

Marcos A. Ferraez as Police Officer

Lukas Haas as George Munn

Patrick Fugit as Officer Elwood

Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Cici Lau as Gho Zhu

David Lau as Sam Wong Zhu

Rory Scovel as The Count

Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg

Samara Weaving as Constance Moore

Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach

Ethan Suplee as Wilson

Marc Platt as Producer

• Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren
• Justin Hurwitz

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Babylon Reviews Are Here, See What Critics Are Saying About Damian Chazelle’s Hollywood Epic

Audiences are in for a wild ride.

After providing audiences with Academy Award winners like Whiplash , La La Land and First Man , Damien Chazelle is back to fill our holiday season with another wild story that’s likely to be in contention for next year’s biggest awards . Babylon is a movie about movies, as audiences will follow five main characters through the era when Hollywood was transitioning from silent film to talkies. First reactions to Babylon were mixed, with people calling it everything from “a love letter to cinema” to “a flaming hot mess.” Now the reviews are here to help us decide if we’ll be taking a trip to the theater for Christmas.

Babylon ’s impressive ensemble is one reason to be excited about the movie , as it stars Margot Robbie , Brad Pitt , Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li, whose characters jump through time, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows of their careers. Let’s see what the critics are saying, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Babylon . Eric Eisenberg rates the film 3 stars out of 5, saying that while the first half is one of the best movies of the year, it’s destined to be divisive, yet still worth the watch. His take:

At its best, Babylon is exciting, hilarious, and a blast… but those adjectives are mostly reserved for describing approximately the first 90 minutes. The back half of the film, while it does have its highlights, demonstrates an inability for the movie to fully carry its own weight, and the multi-faceted narrative descends into tropes and some groan-worthy material before the end credits start to roll.

Leah Greenblatt of EW grades the film a C-, saying Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey  the depravity of Hollywood, for “three turgid, clattering hours,” and the result is frankly exhausting. She says in the review:  

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt; sex is universal currency, and death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline.

Tomris Laffly of AV Club , however, calls Babylon “masterful,” grading the “deliciously decadent” movie an A and saying it’s not a minute too long. The critic says despite what’s going on on-screen, this is the writer/director’s most clear-headed film: 

With an electric score by Justin Hurwitz (that occasionally resembles the chords in Chazelle’s La La Land too audibly), it’s all pure, eye-gouging debauchery for 30 or so minutes. Before the suggestive title Babylon appears, there will be plenty of orgies, mountains of drugs, sexual fetishes, naughty performance bits, projectile vomiting, and more sweaty bare bodies than one can count.

Babylon shows yet again that Damien Chazelle isn’t afraid to swing for the fences or go too far, according to Travis Hopson of Punch Drunk Critics , making him a filmmaker always worth checking out. However, only the lead trio get the proper amount of attention, and themes of race and homophobia would likely have been better off omitted since they’re not properly explored, the critic argues, rating the film 3 out of 5 stars:  

Like the blitzed-out-of-its-mind lovechild of Boogie Nights and The Wolf of Wall Street, Damien Chazelle’s exciting, exhausting, and sloppy ode to jazz age Hollywood, Babylon, features elephant shit and golden showers in the first ten minutes. It also features a Los Angeles as you’ve rarely seen it…tranquil. For a moment, anyway. The city is in the midst of an epic transition, not just from silent movies into ‘talkies’, but the city as a whole from quiet desert to sprawling show business epicenter. They say that Hollywood will chew people up and spit them out, but this has always been true. Never moreso than the tragic, hopeful, and thrilling era that Chazelle lovingly, maddeningly depicts.

Nick Schager of The Daily Beast calls Babylon “an orgy of every worst idea in Hollywood” and a story about the roaring ‘20s in which  no one looks, acts, or talks like they’re from that decade. The critic says the movie steals from every great director before collapsing in on itself. More from Schager:

Chockablock with profanity, nudity, and all manner of demented degradation, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to First Man is a three-hour work of grand and grotesque excess that strives to celebrate the wondrous power of the movies. All it does, however, is crassly steal the magic of its superior ancestors, right up to a finale that parasitically pinches yesteryear’s classics for the pathos it can’t conjure on its own.

Love it or hate it, people are definitely going to be talking about Damien Chazelle’s latest offering, especially in regards to awards. If you want to be in the conversation, you’ll be able to see this one for yourself in theaters starting Friday, December 23. Be sure to also check out what’s headed to the big screen in the new year with our 2023 Movie Release Schedule .

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Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.

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By Manohla Dargis

The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.

It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.

Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.

Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.

Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.

Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.

Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.

There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.

The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.

Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.

There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed .” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.

Babylon Rated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of an actress. She is Margot Robbie, not Robinet.

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Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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“Babylon,” Reviewed: Damien Chazelle Whips Up a Golden-Hollywood Cream Puff

By Richard Brody

I’ve long suspected that the venom inspired by Damien Chazelle ’s films is proportional to viewers’ devotion to their subjects—that his abuse of jazz in “ Whiplash ,” of acting and jazz in “ La La Land ,” and of history in “First Man” bothers most the people who care the most about those topics. His enthusiasts, meanwhile, exult in his way with myths—in his grandiose inflation of characters and their struggles into epic journeys. It’s as if, having felt the power of “Star Wars” through its incarnation of grand-scale myth, Chazelle applies its lessons to realistic quests and turns them into fantasies. He does it again in “Babylon,” which is set in Hollywood, mainly from 1926 to 1932, although it’s a little different from its predecessors. What distinguishes it from Chazelle’s other films, and what it shares with another recent film of swoony movie-love by a filmmaker of sentimental bombast—Steven Spielberg’s “ The Fabelmans ”—is the vigor of its storytelling. I think that the vigor of both films is rooted in the same source: knowledge. Just as Spielberg knows his own past, Chazelle knows Hollywood lore, and doubtless learned much more of it in the planning and the research. It’s the movie’s good anecdotes, rather than any dramatic arc, that make “Babylon” engaging, over the course of most of its three hours and nine minutes. It also takes such lore at face value, befitting the aura of legend that enhances both real-life incidents from classic Hollywood and its tall tales; these stories were born to be chazelled.

“Babylon” and “The Fabelmans,” along with Sam Mendes’s “ Empire of Light ,” make for a magic-of-the-movies trilogy that’s imbued with a halcyon retrospective glow—a nostalgic admiration for Hollywood’s past glories. Spielberg’s film is set in the fifties and early sixties, Mendes’s film in 1980-81, and both see movies of those eras as redemptive. It’s Chazelle’s film that’s, surprisingly, the most ambivalent; it’s noncommittal about Hollywood movies of the more distant era in which it’s set. Oddly enough, he appears to have little to say about them, a scant idea of what they were like and what made some of them great and others not. What the movie exalts, and what Chazelle appears to love, is the personalities—with all their flaws—who made Hollywood synonymous with its visionary boldness and blundering excesses, its blithe vulgarity and cavalier insensitivity, its vast spectrum of opportunity and ferocious maw of self-destruction.

“Babylon” is “Singin’ in the Rain” as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy. (Its first scene sets the satirical tone, with a deluge of shit coming from the rear of an elephant being transported to a blowout Hollywood party.) Like Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s 1952 film, which is explicitly and implicitly referenced in Chazelle’s, “Babylon” tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to talking pictures. It’s centered on three characters. The aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is cognate with the earlier film’s domineering, petulant, and voice-challenged silent-film diva Lina Lamont (who, in effect, gets a backstory here). A breezy yet earnest leading man, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), embodies the dark fate that would have awaited Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood if he couldn’t sing and dance. The third protagonist, who is in effect the hyphen between the two, is a producer’s factotum, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), who falls for Nellie the moment he sees her crash her car into a statue. He gets her into his boss’s wild party, where she gets noticed and cast in a small role that launches her. Manuel—or Manny, the nickname that she gives him—has been dreaming of a job on a set; at the party, Manny meets Jack, who takes a shine to him and gets him the desired in.

What’s redemptive about the movies, for Chazelle, isn’t so much the experience of viewing them but the benefits of making them. There’s no young Spielberg here, using a small camera to make Hollywood-inspired magic with whoever’s on hand; rather, there’s Manuel’s rapturous desire to be a part of something “bigger” than himself; there’s Nellie’s furious drive to escape from a hellish family life. (When a director asks Nellie, who’s playing a bit part, how she’s able to cry on cue, Nellie responds, “I just think of home.”) The brassy aspirant uninhibitedly expresses her reason for breaking into movies: “You don’t become a star, you either are one or you ain’t. I am.” As for Jack, he knows that he was a nobody before becoming a star, and he’s greatly devoted to making movies that connect deeply with “real people on the ground”; to do so, Jack wants the movies to be more innovative, audacious, and artistic. He says that he wants films to become as up to date and cutting-edge as twelve-tone music and Bauhaus architecture, “so that tomorrow’s lonely man can say, ‘Eureka, I am not alone.’ ” More plausibly, he likens the arrival of sound in movies to the discovery of perspective in painting.

Chazelle depicts the freewheeling anarchy of silent-film shoots: shouting, jousting, talking trash while the camera rolls, rowdy improvisation, last-minute derring-do. The movies made that way, he suggests, showed people as they really are, in contrast to the clinical, constrained solemnity and theatrical artifice of sound-stage work in the early days of talking pictures. The uninhibited boldness of Nellie’s earthy silent-film début and the sentimental heartiness of Jack’s silent-drama presence make a mockery of the silliness of Jack performing the song “Singin’ in the Rain” with a bouncy choral ensemble or the rigidity with which the untrained Nellie needs to hit her marks and deliver her lines in her first talking picture. (The latter scene, one of Chazelle’s many extended set pieces, borrows many of the elements from the mishaps of sound-filming depicted in “Singin’ in the Rain”—microphones in fixed positions, hidden amid décor, dictating actors’ placement and gestures and hampering their performance.)

The nasal-voiced, Joisey-accented Nellie apparently does little to develop (or even seek) the dose of theatrical skill needed to make the transition to sound; she’s too busy indulging in various forms of self-destructive frivolity. Manny rises quickly from unquestioningly intrepid assistant (breaking a strike, stealing an ambulance) to producer, but his devotion to the studio pushes him a step too far, as he betrays his principles and his friendships and comes to grief the melodramatic way, through moony swoony love. These unhinged personalities are just a few among many: the unprincipled yet discerning gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart); the unlucky-in-love producer George Munn (Lukas Haas); the gifted, hard-edged female director Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton); the intertitle writer and lesbian artiste Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li); the Black jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whom Manny propels to stardom; the temperamental German director Otto von Strassberger (Spike Jonze); the drug dealer and aspiring actor called the Count (Rory Scovel); and the real-life “boy genius” producer Irving Thalberg himself (Max Minghella); plus a vast crew of hangers-on, acolytes, fixers, dreamers, and manipulators. They all form a wonderland, a magic kingdom that spews forth fictions that, however contrived or implausible, embody the realities of the passions, the risks, the devastations, the carnal pleasures, the obscene material splendors, and the ferocious drive to obtain them (along with at least a few drops, however diluted or adulterated, of sincere artistic ambition).

Chazelle’s vision of the myth-mad vitality and built-in tragedy of classic-era Hollywood comes at the price of its substance. The movie offers no politics, no history—1929 comes and goes with no stock-market crash (which in real life hit Hollywood and its players hard), no Depression, no electoral campaigns. There’s little sense of the corporate side of Hollywood, the hard-nosed boardroom management, the studios’ industrial organization (which is already on display in King Vidor’s inside-Hollywood comedy “ Show People ,” from 1928). These absences are more than merely factual; they set a tone for the movie that turns the tragedy superficial and the comedy decorative. Supernumeraries get killed and stories get silenced (except when they don’t), but there’s neither a sense of the mutual back-scratching or the power behind the suppression of news, no sense of the law at the studio gates, whether in threatened prosecutions or looming censorship—no Hays Code. Chazelle whips the story into cream-puff whorls of myths upon myths. He delivers a movie that’s neither unified nor disparate but homogenized, its elements of reality and hyperbole alike assimilated to the same creamy glow of rueful wonder. (The Coen brothers’ “ Hail, Caesar! ” has twice as much substance and vastly more humor—and compassion—at just over half the duration.)

Chazelle also puts forth a view of the magic of the movies in a phrase that strikes me as appallingly oblivious and unthinking, when Jack, facing newly hostile audiences, asks Elinor why he’s losing his appeal and she answers, “There is no why.” It’s approximately the line that Primo Levi relates regarding his internment in Auschwitz: he responded to a guard’s cruelty by asking why, and the guard responded, “Here there is no why.” I almost fell out of my seat.

“Singin’ in the Rain” offered a triumphalist point of view, asserting that the styles of the new, postwar Hollywood were indeed advances on the artifice and extreme stylization of silent movies and the primitive techniques of earlier talking pictures. It came amid a time of actual rapid artistic and cultural change in Hollywood: “Singin’ ” premièred just eleven years after “Citizen Kane,” four years after the court decision that helped to break up studio dominance and opened the door to independent producers, and during the rise of television, which thrust Hollywood into economic crisis. The self-satisfaction of “Singin’ in the Rain” had some aesthetic justification, but it also had a major thread of Hollywood self-advertising. “Babylon” is something of a work of salesmanship, too, offering a pitch for freestanding movies seen on the big screen at yet another moment when movie studios and theatres are facing economic disaster. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Babylon” reaches from the past into the cinematic present, with another fact-based fantasy—a wild montage of subliminally brief clips that build the arc of movie history from Muybridge and the Lumière brothers to nineteen-sixties modernists and onward to recent cinematic times; it bends inevitably toward Chazelle. Artistically, what “Babylon” adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one’s eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark. ♦

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By Justin Chang

‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

Margot Robbie plays an ingénue, Brad Pitt a silent film star and Diego Calva a dreamer in this exuberantly messy look at La La Land's early days — an acid spin on 'Singin' in the Rain.'

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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With brash and bawdy “ Babylon ,” director Damien Chazelle blows something between a poisoned kiss and a big fat raspberry at the same town he so swoonily depicted in “La La Land.” Separated by nine decades and nearly an ocean of cynicism, the two Tinseltown-set films seem unlikely to have sprung from the same head; we might never suspect they had, were it not for musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz’s busy, hyper-jazzinated score. Here, Chazelle rewinds the clock to Hollywood’s raucous early days — specifically, the transition from silent filmmaking to talkies, when the industry was still fresh and figuring out what it could be.

From the Saturnalian showbiz house party that kicks things off — an impressively staged, thoroughly debauched bacchanalia that owes as much to “Caligula” as it does to Scorsese — to the disarmingly schmaltzy montage with which this whirling three-hour folly climaxes, Chazelle demands that we see The Movies differently. Fine. Hollywood was hardly the innocent, asexual industry that a classic like “Singin’ in the Rain” (or later, “The Artist”) so lovingly depicted. But those movies deliver so much more pleasure per frame than this one does, which wears out its welcome in scene after exhausting scene, while purporting to set the record straight.

Chazelle lets us know right out of the gate the kind of picture he has in store when a rented elephant empties its bowels on an unlucky animal wrangler (and, given where the camera is placed, on our heads as well). That outrageous spectacle is instantly topped by a kinky scene in what could be Fatty Arbuckle’s bedroom, as a corpulent silent comic giddily awaits his golden shower. Later that night, the starlet who indulged him will be dead of a drug overdose, forcing a desperate studio fixer (Flea) to tap Mexican employee Manny Torres (Calva) to get creative in disposing of the body. Characters major and minor alike are constantly dying in “Babylon” — no fewer than eight over the course of the film, plus two more name-checked in Variety obits at the end — but the tone is pitched at such a satirical extreme, not a one registers emotionally. Not even you-know-who’s.

Chazelle has essentially orchestrated a loud, vulgar live-action cartoon of a film, and while it’s exhilarating at times to witness the sheer virtuosity of his staging, the performances are all over the place. “Babylon” sorely lacks a point of view. Manny’s the closest thing the movie offers to an audience proxy, starting out as a wide-eyed outsider to the opening fete and working his way up to a studio executive position. But when asked by force-of-nature party crasher Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) why he wants to be in showbiz, the best Manny can muster is “I just want to be part of something bigger, I guess.”

Nearly all the main characters get a why-movies-matter monologue. Nearly all are shabbily written. “All the c—s in Lafayette called me the ugliest mutt in the neighborhood. Well, let them see me now!” Nellie shouts after her dancing at the party gets her discovered. The way she sashays is out of period, but that’s one of Chazelle’s incongruous rules for the movie: He spent 15 years researching the era, tapped production designer Florencia Martin and costume pro Mary Zophres to get every little detail right, then banished anything (like the Charleston) that he thought might take audiences out of the experience. Later, movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt, mugging it up as a John Gilbert-like romantic lead) will question, “The man who puts gasoline in your tank goes to your movies — why? … Because he feels less alone there.”

Witnessing it all is a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who dictates her dispatches from the sidelines. She’s a curious character, an ahead-of-her-time Hedda Hopper, though she’s by far the most eloquent. Her “why they laughed” speech — “It’s those of us in the dark, those who just watch, who survive” — is the best scene in a movie full of far showier set pieces. Elinor will later be hired by the studio as a kind of manners coach for Nellie, which makes no sense, but then, neither does the idea that a scene-stealing bisexual woman named Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), loosely inspired by Anna May Wong, serves as a cabaret singer by night but pays her bills painting intertitles.

The middle hour of the film, which finds Jack and Nellie adapting to the advent of sound, owes a huge debt to “Singin’ in the Rain.” Chazelle stacks one big set piece after another — a string-of-pearls structure, with bawdy comedy more than music being the focus of each — then smash-cuts to the next scene, often to a blaring burst of jazz, or else the melancholy plunk of Hurwitz’s broken-player-piano score. You could argue that Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is also one of the film’s main characters, although he gets a far more anemic share of the plot and could have been cut out completely without much changing the film’s chemistry. Whereas all the other principals get overwritten introductions, Sidney makes his entrance onstage, playing his trumpet. Chazelle is obsessed with jazz, so maybe that solo takes the place of a monologue. Or maybe editor Tom Cross is confronted with too many threads.

There are myriad other flamboyant characters in a whirling ensemble that borrows more than is reasonable from other directors. That big opening party, for example, appears to be Chazelle’s way of one-upping “New York, New York,” though it lacks Scorsese’s instinct for privileging character over camera moves. Toward the end, an on-set drug dealer who calls himself “The Count” (Rory Scovel) gets Manny in a fix with a strung-out gangster (Tobey Maguire in a most unsettling cameo) — a rip-off of the Alfred Molina/Wonderland sequence in “Boogie Nights,” until it takes a deranged turn that suggests the “Gimp” scene from “Pulp Fiction.”

In his book “Hollywood Babylon,” Kenneth Anger spills the secrets of the Golden Age stars. “Film folk of the period are depicted as engaging in madcap, nonstop off-screen capers,” he writes. “The legend overlooks one fact — fear. That ever present thrilling-erotic fear that the bottom could drop out of their gilded dreams at any time.” Chazelle borrows both his title and that kernel of wisdom from Anger’s trashy tell-all, focusing on an alarming phenomenon from the late 1920s and early ’30s — before anyone dared to label such entertainment “art” — in which so many industry types took their own lives.

Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 189 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation of a Marc Platt, Wild Chickens, Organism Pictures production. Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton. Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Tobey Maguire, Wyck Godfrey, Helen Estabrook, Adam Siegel.
• Crew: Director, writer: Damien Chazelle. Camera: Linus Sandgren. Editor: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.
• With: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde.

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Babylon Review

20 Jan 2023

You will seldom find a film as simultaneously romantic and repulsive as  Babylon . Damien Chazelle ’s palpably impassioned, occasionally overwhelming ode to the epic moviemaking magic of the pioneering studio era features at least four bodily fluids (three of which splash vibrantly across the screen during the film’s ambitious opening 45 minutes), and chucks out grotesquely framed sex acts like candy. For every shot of a single tear rolling down Margot Robbie ’s stoic face, there’s one of an elephant’s exploding rectum. It’s a visceral, mesmerising balancing act that doesn’t stop tipping throughout the film’s packed-to-the-rafters three-plus-hour runtime.

Chazelle wastes no time in setting his tempo, as he plunges into a 35-minute tour of a buzzy Hollywood party, rife with undulating dancers, live jazz and an Aladdin’s cave of hard drugs. Aspiring star Nellie (Robbie) has been snuck in by the puppy-eyed industry rookie Manny (Diego Calva). A freshly single A-list actor Jack ( Brad Pitt ) is the man of the hour. It’s a triumph of a set-piece; a relentlessly kinetic jamboree with Robbie at the epicentre, like a red spinning top with long, erratic limbs. It will leave you reeling. Only no sooner has the dust settled, it’s kicked it back up again, as the next day the three head to a huge, violent and tumultuous film set in the desert; Nellie making her debut in a dance scene, Jack roping Manny in to help on a grand battlefield-set romance. Here the film is at its most enjoyable, as Chazelle gleefully explores every corner of production, from the throbbing, sweaty temples of the directors working across different shoots to the vast sandy vistas peppered with exhausted extras.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one.

As Nellie, Robbie is impressively athletic, whether she’s wrestling a rattlesnake or making a stomach-churning exit at an upper-crust party. Yet her range is set firmly to Harley Quinn in ’20s Hollywood — maniacal and exuberant — which leaves Nellie’s more emotionally demanding moments somewhat lacking. Clumsy dialogue contributes to this problem elsewhere: a two-hander between the brilliant Jean Smart as a seasoned gossip journalist and a post-heyday Jack descends into saccharine talk of ghosts and angels and the enduring power of celluloid.

Chazelle assumes his audience shares his obsession with what cinema means, but it’s never made entirely clear what that is. When Manny falls down a depraved rabbit hole with shady crime boss James ( Tobey Maguire , on creepy, excellent form), the film veers off track, painting marginalised performers as feared freaks without the celebratory or comedic subtext. And storylines involving Li-Jun Li’s queer performer and Jovan Adepo’s session musician-turned-on-screen star get overshadowed by the film’s insistent messaging on the power of film.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one. The set-pieces are masterful, the comedy caustic and bold, the ensemble cast commanding even in the face of chaos. Its ambition is undeniable. Yet even with all its flair, what it’s trying to say about cinema gets lost in the noise.

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Screen Rant

9 reasons babylon divided both critics & audiences so much.

Babylon was a huge $80 million movie with two movie stars in the lead roles, but the film divided both audiences and critics, and here's why.

How critics responded to the the release of Babylon was drastically different from how audiences responded to the film. The epic three-hour period drama from visionary director Damien Chazelle wasn't received as the prestige movie that the studio expected, with critics and audiences adopting contrasting opinions of the film. Featuring a star-studded cast, Babylon follows the lives of Hollywood actors during the silent film era in the 1920s and chronicles their struggles as the industry evolved with the introduction of the talkies.

Chazelle also reunited with frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz, who composes another magnificent jazz score. Unfortunately, while the movie's score was universally praised, it was the only thing about Babylon that audiences could agree on. Despite a visionary director at the helm, two of Hollywood's greatest actors working today, a fascinating concept, and a huge budget, the movie divided audiences and critics. Though audiences and critics don't often see eye to eye, Babylon was greeted with a mixed reception with a "rotten" 56% on Rotten Tomatoes and an even worse audience score of 52%. Here's why Babylon is regarded as a love-it-or-hate-it movie and what led to its mixed reception.

RELATED: Babylon's Shocking Jane Thornton Story Is Inspired By A Real 100-Year-Old Hollywood Scandal (Which Was Way Worse)

9 Babylon's Black Humor & Hollywood Satire Divided Audiences

Babylon is a pitch-black look at Hollywood through a satirical lens, which didn't sit well with many audiences. IGN noted, " Babylon wants to make you believe elaborate satire and profound introspection justifies the 3-hour experience — but its promised layers are thin and translucent. " The Hollywood satire is unintentionally uncomfortable, such as Nellie, who considers herself an outcast, covering herself in luxury foods at a classy party. However, in a more positive review, Richard Brody suggested, " Babylon is Singin’ in the Rain as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy " (via The New Yorker ).

8 Babylon Was (Arguably) A Massive Step Down From Chazelle's Previous Movies

Given how divisive Babylon is, some viewers believe it's a masterpiece and an extremely clever period movie about the Golden Age of Hollywood. However, given that it comes from Damien Chazelle, who quickly became something of a wunderkind in the movie industry following the success of Whiplash , some critics believe Babylon was a step down and that it lacked what made La La Land special. City AM mentioned, " Judged against Chazelle’s previous work, Babylon lacks the edge of Whiplash, the heart of La La Land, and the focus of First Man. Such a well-versed student of cinema should know better than to fall into self-indulgence ."

7 Babylon Didn't Necessarily Earn Its Three-Hour Runtime

Audiences couldn't disagree more when it comes to Babylon's huge three-hour runtime, as InSession Film noted, " It may have been a box office failure, but all three hours are utilized perfectly and never goes flat ." On the other hand, Jim Schembri argued, " The film feels like a terrific two-hour film crammed into three hours, the first of which is full of fits and starts. " It's been argued that the three-hour runtime really is excessive since so many of the scenes are drawn out. If the movie had 30 minutes shaved off its runtime, Babylon being a box office bomb could have possibly been avoided.

6 Babylon's Extreme Scenes Were Accused Of Being Too Gratuitous

Given that Babylon is an unforgiving pitch-black satirical comedy that's R-rated and comes from a director who had total creative freedom, the movie doesn't hold back when it comes to attempting to shock audiences. Q Network argued, " Chazelle seems to have abandoned the moving humanism that animated his early films, opting instead to wallow in grotesquerie, absurdity, and debauchery. " Whether it's a close-up of an elephant's anus as it defecates in the very opening scene, or any one of the Wolf Of Wall Street -like over-the-top sex parties, it doesn't come as a surprise that Damien Chazelle thinks movies should be more divisive .

5 Some Critics Thought Babylon Was Derivative Of Other Movies

While Chazelle has often paid homage to other movies, such as references to Rebel Without a Cause in La La Land , but some critics believed those allusions crossed a line in Babylon . Chazelle has been accused of being derivative of movies such as Boogie Nights, Singin' in the Rain , and the films of Frederico Fellini. The Australian noted, " Attempts to out-Fellini Fellini are regrettable and for much of its length Babylon is an unsubtle and indigestible mess so that despite all the talent involved and the fascinating subject matter, it must be seen as something of a disaster ."

4 Tobey Maguire's Role In Babylon Proved Divisive

The third act of Babylon is almost like an entirely different movie from the first two acts, as it almost becomes a body horror when Tobey Maguire's drug lord character James McKay is introduced. Maguire isn't known for playing villains, but he totally hams it up as a creepy, intimidating drug dealer with the worst teeth imaginable, especially when his kinks are revealed in the depraved underground gathering. Cinema Blend argued that the character actually fit into the movie's themes perfectly, noting, " The man is another lost soul duped into the magic of the movies, much like Nellie ." Conversely, Daily Maverick called his character arc an " unnecessary detour ."

3 Babylon's Love-It-Or-Hate-It Final Five Minutes

There's no doubt that Babylon's ending is divisive , as the movie flashes forward to the present day with an explosive montage of several modern classic movies, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Avatar . Independent called the ending a " visual assault of a sequence " and the " most sickening in film history ." With the montage, Babylon suddenly becomes a celebration of cinema and an argument for why movies are important. However, the previous 175 minutes of the movie were seemingly an argument for exactly the opposite, depicting how Hollywood is a cesspool of lost hopes and dreams, and that movies bring out the worst in people.

2 Babylon Treads A Line Between Cinematic Bravery & Filmmaking Hubris

If there's one word to describe Babylon, it's " excessive ," and Chazelle was clearly given no notes from the studio and full creative freedom. While some of the movie can be commended for its bravery, such as casting a critical eye on an industry that's only ever put on a pedestal, it's also extremely self-indulgent, according to a number of critics. That's summed up by a comment from the Irish Times that both praises and criticizes the movie's hubris: " Chazelle’s film commemorates the era’s hubris as it indulges in a bit of its own. This is how a world ends. Not with a whimper but a great deal of banging, baby. And vomiting. And snorting. "

1 Critics Couldn't Agree On Margot Robbie & Brad Pitt's Performances

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are arguably two of the popular and talented actors working today. However, critics couldn't agree on their performances in Babylon . Some felt that Babylon made excellent use of their acting talents, whereas others shared a completely different view. Sioux City Journal noted, " Pitt and Robbie are good actors. They’re not miracle workers. Calva tries, but when you’re stuck behind an elephant, the results aren’t always good." Making matters worse, Brad Pitt's Babylon character was considered extremely unlikable, so being played by one of Hollywood's most charming actors did little to help viewers become invested in Pitt's performance.

Sources: Sioux City Journal , Irish Times , Independent , Daily Maverick , Cinema Blend , The Australian , Q Network , The New Yorker , IGN

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Babylon review – Damien Chazelle’s messy, exhausting tale of early Hollywood

Despite star wattage from Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, ​the ​La La Land​ director’s ​overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown is more hysterical than historical

I n the opening act of Damien Chazelle ’s hyperventilating, splashboard portrait of early Hollywood, an elephant shits explosively straight on to the screen, covering us in a veritable sewage farm of sloppy excreta. Over the next three hours (believe me, it feels longer) we’ll be treated to a man chomping down on live rats in the bowels of hell, a giant alligator snapping at the heels of subterranean revellers to the monkey/chimp refrain of Aba Daba Honeymoon , and a rattlesnake sinking its fangs into Margot Robbie’s neck before having its head cut off with a knife. We’ll also get to watch an actor pee on a Fatty Arbuckle-style partygoer (“Playtime with potty time!”) and see Robbie projectile-vomiting all over someone’s nice suit, extravagantly despoiling a Klikó rug in the process. All this is delivered in shrieking, hyperactive tones that make Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! look like one of the slower works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr . Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

The story (if that word can be used to describe a succession of over-choreographed set pieces strung together by interstitial date markers and bouts of screaming) follows silver-screen dreamers Manuel “Manny” Torres ( Diego Calva ) and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) as they ascend the greasy pole to stardom in the foundational days of motion pictures. Nellie wants to become a star (“You don’t become a star, honey. You either are one or you aren’t”), while Manny longs to be in the movie-making business in any capacity, from shovelling shit at glitzy parties, to becoming a fixer for matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and assuming uncertain positions at a studio (when asked if he’s “a producer”, he replies that he is an “ executive ”).

As the pair’s fortunes change, so does the world to which they have sold their souls, with movies shifting from silents to sound as the wild west lawlessness of the unregulated emergent industry (immortalised in Kenneth Anger’s apocryphal tome Hollywood Babylon , to which Chazelle’s title alludes) gives way to something altogether more corporate. With almost breathtaking audacity, Chazelle imagines Babylon to be a kind of origins story for Singin’ in the Rain , clumsily nodding towards the 1952 classic before simply lifting clips from it that remind us how much better Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly were at doing this self-referential Hollywood shtick.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive. One sequence in which Manny visits a giggling gangster (a Joker-faced Tobey Maguire) is pretty much lifted from the Alfred Molina scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s superior 1997 tale of movie madness Boogie Nights , right down to the lurking sidekick who keeps making random explosive noises (swapping cherry bombs for coughs). Then there’s the inevitable jazz subplots that serve as a continuing apologia for the whitewashing criticisms levelled against Chazelle’s La La Land while also suggesting that the miniseries format of his 2020 Netflix outing The Eddy might have better suited this sprawling mess of a movie.

From Jean Smart’s gossip columnist Elinor St John to Spike Jonze’s German director Otto von Strassberger, the performances veer between pastiche and pantomime, although bored viewers can while away the hours playing spot the celebrity cipher. Max Minghella may be specifically named as “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, but is Pitt meant to be silent-movie star John Gilbert? How much Clara Bow is there in Nellie LaRoy? Surely Li Jun Li’s vampy Lady Fay Zhu is just a thinly disguised Anna May Wong , the groundbreaking Chinese American star.

Justin Hurwitz’s overworked score (the recipient of several awards), Florencia Martin’s lavish production design and Linus Sandgren’s endlessly swirling cinematography all add to the overcooked tenor. Finally we arrive at a climactic car-crash cross between Cinema Paradiso and the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a ludicrous showreel that’s meant to be a time-jumping tumble through decades of movie magic but actually resembles those toe-curling multiplex adverts they play before the main feature, trying to persuade customers not to watch films on the small screen. On this evidence I’d happily stay at home.

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Babylon 5: the road home   photos.

John Sheridan unexpectedly finds himself transported through multiple timelines and alternate realities. Along the way, he reunites with some familiar faces and discovers cosmic new revelations about the history, purpose and meaning of the universe.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Action/Violence)

Genre: Sci-fi, Animation

Original Language: English

Director: Matt Peters

Writer: J. Michael Straczynski

Runtime: 1h 19m

Production Co: Warner Bros. Animation

Cast & Crew

Bruce Boxleitner

John Sheridan Voice

Claudia Christian

Susan Ivanova Voice

Zathras , Jeffrey Sinclair Voice

Anthony Hansen

Michael Garibaldi Voice

Reporter , Computer Voice Voice

Peter Jurasik

Londo Mollari Voice

Phil LaMarr

Dr. Stephen Franklin Voice

Piotr Michael

David Sheridan Voice

Andrew Morgado

G'Kar Voice

Lennier Voice

Rebecca Riedy

Delenn Voice

Tracy Scoggins

Captain Elizabeth Lochley Voice

Patricia Tallman

Lyta Alexander Voice

Matt Peters

J. Michael Straczynski

Screenwriter

Sam Register

Executive Producer

Craig Paulsen

Film Editing

Kristopher Carter

Original Music

Michael McCuistion

Lolita Ritmanis

Matthew Girardi

Art Director

Chris Glenn

Wes Gleason

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Babylon 5: The Road Home - Review

A nostalgic walk down wormhole lane.

Babylon 5: The Road Home is available now for purchase on Digital, 4K HD & Blu-Ray.

You gotta feel for the Babylon 5 fandom. While Star Wars , Star Trek , and even Twin Peaks fans have been fed well with continuing stories or revivals, the B5 loyalists have been sucking space dust. But series creator J. Michael Straczynski recently won the game of licensing chicken by outlasting the unnamed Warner Brothers exec he blames for blocking new Babylon 5 projects for decades. With the greenlights now glowing, the first new entry in the franchise since 2007’s Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is the animated nostalgia fest The Road Home. The beautifully rendered, 79-minute movie celebrates not only Straczynski's patient fanbase, but the returning cast from the original series. Unabashedly sentimental, romantic, and a bit corny at times, The Road Home plays it safe by appealing to contemporary appetites for universe-hopping stories, but uses its deep bench of memorable characters very well.

With nearly two decades of downtime between The Lost Tales and The Road Home, the morbid reality is that some actors from the original cast are no longer with us, including Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar), Mira Furlan (Ambassador Delenn), Jerry Doyle (Chief Michael Garibaldi), and Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin). But those characters can live on with new voices in animation, which affords The Road Home the special distinction of being the only way Straczynski could make a new B5 project that allows him to use his full ensemble of characters without restrictions or recasting. And he clearly does that with a lot of joy, if not a tremendous amount of originality, because The Road Home is essentially a multiverse traipse through President John Sheridan’s (Bruce Boxleitner) life.

Two years after heroically ending The Shadow Wars, Sheridan hands the keys of Babylon 5’s command to Captain Elizabeth Lochley (Tracy Scoggins) and accepts a statesman role with the 12 World Alliance. While he frets about his place in the universe, he has no such qualms about his love for his beloved wife, Delenn (Rebecca Riedy). Straczynski uses the depth of their relationship as both the movie’s emotional spine and its grounding tether, as Sheridan is turned into a tachyon-triggered time jumper due to a random exposure event. 

For the bulk of the film, he bounces to his past, his future, and alternate timelines which provide opportunities to reconnect with characters of note within the B5 canon, or revisit moments in and around the life-changing events of The Shadow Wars.

Yes, it’s an effective means to an end in having Sheridan essentially walk down his own sci-fi memory lane. But it’s not a terribly original way to go, considering that multiverse stories have been so terribly tapped out as of late. While just about all sci-fi franchises resort to time travel cliches at some point in their storytelling, it’s a little surprising coming from Straczynski, whose original sci-fi writing for B5 was one of its distinguishing hallmarks. Yet, considering there are no guarantees in Hollywood, it’s also not a mystery why Straczynski uses this particular trope to facilitate an affectionate look back at everything that’s come before. 

The ho-hum of the premise certainly doesn’t take away from how Straczynski reframes and uses his cast in the scenarios Sheridan bounces into. Boxleitner slips right back into his role with a welcome world-weariness and a holster full of Earth-centric, dad joke-esque references. Paul Guyet also gives the film a lot of pep with his very funny take on Zathras, who returns as a key player in deciphering and fixing the quantum physics mess made from Sheridan’s chaotic jumping. It’s also nice to hear the growl of Claudia Christian’s Susan Ivanova, the empathy of Patricia Tallman’s telepath Lyta, and Bill Mumy’s still often confuddled Lennier. Kudos to all of the new voice actors who do a great job embodying the characters they step into with wit and/or gravitas, as needed.

What makes The Road Home stand out the most is how it lives so well in the animated medium. Director Matt Peters and supervising producer Rick Morales, both long-time WB Animation veterans, bring such energy to the project that you wonder why an animated version of Babylon 5 wasn’t tried decades ago. The movie’s mix of 2D and 3D animation infuses new life into the familiar space station, the classic spaceships, and the alien species – especially the bug-like Shadows, who are much scarier now. Unhampered by the restrictions of a live-action budget, every aspect of the B5 world benefits from the glow up that the animation provides. The battle scenes have more stakes, the worlds look more lush and impressive, and the likenesses of the characters to the actors who played them is just the right mix of authentic yet stylized.

The movie's mix of 2D and 3D animation infuses new life into the familiar space station, the classic spaceships, and the alien species

As a reintroduction to the world of Babylon 5, The Road Home does a solid job of catching us back up with the mythology and characters. As a standalone film, it’s more interested in looking back than forward, which might be disappointing for those champing at the bit for new adventures. As a nostalgia piece, it shines a satisfying spotlight on the classic B5 characters and gives President Sheridan an emotional story tied to his love for Delenn, which is a fitting for their arc. It also leaves the door wide open, in an unexpected way, for more classic Babylon 5 stories to come. 

The Verdict

Babylon 5: The Road Home is a worthwhile installment for longtime Babylon 5 fans that have been waiting nearly two decades for anything new in the canon. J. Michael Straczynski’s script stridently wears its heart on its sleeve, which will likely land for nostalgic old-timers but play a little cloying for those without prior investment. The standalone story is easily digestible for all viewers, it just suffers a bit in taking the well-worn multiverse/alternate reality path. However, the choice to make The Road Home an animated film is inspired. The medium vastly improves upon the cut-rate visual effects (and extra tight budgets) of the live-action TV series and movies, and will hopefully serve as a softer transition for the planned live-action reboot.

Babylon 5: The Road Home

Babylon 5: the road home review.

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Zelda Live-Action Movie Director Aims to Make 'Serious' Adaptation That Feels 'Real'

Wants to "give people an escape.".

The Legend of Zelda movie director Wes Ball has outlined his vision for the live-action feature, saying he wants to make a "serious" adaptation that feels "real" to audiences.

Ball, who is known for the Maze Runner trilogy and the upcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes , touched on his ambitions for Nintendo's planned The Legend of Zelda movie during an interview with Total Film , saying that he knows how important the franchise is to fans and wants to provide an "escape" for them.

"I've been thinking about it for a long freakin' time," Ball said (and he isn't bluffing as he first shared his wishes to direct a Zelda movie in 2010 ). "I want to fulfil people's greatest desires. I know it's important, this [Zelda] franchise, to people, and I want it to be a serious movie. A real movie that can give people an escape."

Ball admits that, if he could, he would "live" in the legendary world of Zelda, so when it comes to making the live-action movie, he hopes to create something that seems tangible, with lots of qualities audiences will enjoy, asserting it has "to feel like something real. Something serious and cool but fun and whimsical."

Nintendo announced plans to create a live-action The Legend of Zelda movie in partnership with Sony Pictures last November. Details on how it will build on the gaming company's hit world of wisdom, courage, and power are mostly a mystery, though Ball previously suggested he would love to see it as "a live-action Miyazaki."

Upcoming New Video Game Movies and TV Shows: 2024 Release Dates and Beyond

Shigeru Miyamoto , Legend of Zelda creator and representative director at Nintendo, will produce the film with Avi Arad, the producer of a wide array of movies including the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , while Jurassic World writer Derek Connolly is reportedly handling the script for Zelda's jump to the big screen.

Fans are unsure how to feel about the live-action take , and it is currently unclear exactly which Zelda story the movie will adapt or whether it will be an all-new adventure. Nintendo may opt to explore the most recent and successful entries in the franchise, such as Breath of the Wild , especially if it would open the door to a sequel.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter @AdeleAnkers.

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Aliens attack science in '3 Body Problem,' a new adaptation of a Chinese sci-fi novel

Eric Deggans

The new Netflix series brings to life a sprawling, successful Chinese novel outlining a new kind of alien invasion. Above, Zine Tseng in 3 Body Problem. Maria Heras/Netflix hide caption

The new Netflix series brings to life a sprawling, successful Chinese novel outlining a new kind of alien invasion. Above, Zine Tseng in 3 Body Problem.

My favorite kind of science fiction involves stories rooted in real science — much as I love a good lightsaber or phaser fight, there is something special about seeing characters wrestle with concepts closer to our current understanding of how the universe works.

That's why I enjoy so much of what happens in Netflix's 3 Body Problem , the TV series which brings to life a sprawling, successful Chinese novel rooted in science, outlining a new kind of alien invasion.

Book Reviews

'three-body problem' asks a classic sci-fi question, in chinese.

3 Body Problem actually starts with two problems. First, we meet investigators tackling a string of unexplained suicides by scientists, including one who had a bizarre countdown written on the walls of his home in blood with his eyes gouged out. (Fortunately, viewers only see the horrific aftermath.) Benedict Wong plays one of those investigators, continually lightening the show's ominous vibe with his spot-on portrayal of a world-weary gumshoe tracking the world's biggest mystery with a healthy dose of gallows humor.

Benedict Wong plays Da Shi in 3 Body Problem. Ed Miller/Netflix hide caption

Benedict Wong plays Da Shi in 3 Body Problem.

"One of the betting sites had him picked as a favorite for the next Nobel Prize in physics," Wong's assistant tells him of the scientist who died.

"You can bet on that?" Wong's character replies, looking over the gruesome scene.

Tracking why science is broken

The other problem which surfaces immediately is that science seems to have stopped working. Researchers are reporting results from experiments in supercolliders that make no sense, putting the lie to all our accepted theories of physics. Saul Durand — played by Jovan Adepo, Durand is one among a group of brilliant, young scientist friends at the center of the story — notes simply, "science is broken."

Jovan Adepo and Jin Cheng in 3 Body Problem. Ed Miller/Netflix hide caption

Jovan Adepo and Jin Cheng in 3 Body Problem.

This all adds up to a unique attack on humanity's scientific progress. But who – or what – is behind these bizarre occurrences, involving events which don't seem possible in the modern world?

Netflix's show takes its time unveiling the full scope of the story and answering these questions, which leads to the third problem here. It takes a while for the series' narrative to really gain momentum – my advice is to hang on through the first three episodes (yes, I also hate streaming shows which ask this of beleaguered viewers; but in this case, it's worth it).

The pacing may not be a surprise, given that two of the series' three creators are David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, former showrunners of HBO's Game of Thrones , which had its own problems with narrative flow at times (the third creator is former True Blood writer/executive producer Alexander Woo). Once the show does find its groove, the series builds into an epic science fiction tale with eye-popping special effects – the tragic destruction of a huge ship packed with people is one that stuck with me long after viewing — and a timeline stretching from China's 1960s-era cultural revolution to the present day.

Bringing a Chinese sci fi-literary triumph to TV

Netflix's 3 Body Problem is based on a 2008 novel from Chinese engineer and science fiction writer Liu Cixin; the original novel became a book series touted by big names like Barack Obama. It managed the neat trick of popularizing Chinese science fiction internationally while delivering compelling observations on the nature of humanity's societal and technological progress, some of which actually find their way into the TV show.

Cultural Revolution-Meets-Aliens: Chinese Writer Takes On Sci-Fi

It makes sense that a story like this — which crosses between Western and Chinese culture to tell the story of a planet under threat – would be cracked by Netflix. The streaming service has educated a generation of American customers to appreciate smart, entertaining TV from South Korea, Latin America, Europe and elsewhere across the globe.

So kicking off 3 Body Problem with a scene showing a young Chinese scientist watching an angry mob murder her father – who is also a scientist – during the purges of China's cultural revolution feels daring and entirely on brand. Later on, that younger scientist, fueled by hate and loss, will make a decision that puts the entire planet at risk, showing how disappointment in humanity's missteps can lead to desperate, misguided solutions.

Fans of the books will find some tweaks here to make for better television, amping up the thriller elements of the story to ask a compelling question: How to fight an alien enemy targeting the world's scientific progress?

As the characters in 3 Body Problem lurch toward answers, we all get to bask in an ambitious narrative fueling an ultimately impressive tale. Just remember to be patient as the series sets the stage early on.