Damien Chazelle’s new movie, Babylon, will hit theatres on December 23, but is already stirring up public opinion.
Set in the 1920s, in Hollywood, it retraces the transition from silent to sound films within the industry. As the synopsis of the movie explains, Babylon is “a tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.”
The movie’s big names include Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva.
One of the most eagerly anticipated movies of the year, it’s getting mixed reviews before it even comes out. While most critics consider Margot Robbie’s performance one of the movie’s highlights, they disagree on whether the movie hit the target of showing the excess, glitz and recklessness of those years. The plot is chaotic, and intense and while some embrace the havoc and find it extremely evocative in representing the opulence of the 1920s, others think Chazelle’s movie is guilty of a flat and overall confusing plot.
Film critic Scott Menzel affirmed that Babylon is “a love letter to cinema that made me hate cinema”, and similarly his colleague Ryan Swen dubbed it as “truly monstrous.”
Actor Josh Blumenkranz, on the other hand, called the movie a flat-out “love letter to cinema’” and Jim Hemphill, filmmaker, “adored all the 180-plus minutes of it.”
But as we all now, the most important critics are the public who vote with their money, and that verdict won’t come in till around Christmas.
