Babylon A.D. (2008)

Babylon A.D. arrives in 2008 carrying a mercenary, a convent, and a pregnant virgin, which is a great deal of freight for a ninety-minute Fox cut that its own director has since disowned. Vin Diesel plays Toorop, a man hired to move a young woman named Aurora from Kyrgyzstan to New York, and the film spends its runtime in overpopulated slums, a rusting submarine, and a snowbound ambush by weaponized drones. It is a grim travelogue of the near future, assembled from parts of better films, and it never settles on what it wants to say about the Noelite cult at its center.

The Noelite faith is a money-and-power operation, run by a High Priestess who berates her executives over twenty years of planning gone to waste. That is the closest the film comes to a thesis about greed, and the critique stays institutional and personal, aimed at a scheming clergy instead of an economic order. Elsewhere the ambitions are modest. Aurora is a vessel and a plot device, guarded by Sister Rebeka and pursued by everyone else, and the screenplay offers no gendered argument about her fate. Her superintelligence comes from an implanted supercomputer, a hardware problem, not a portrait of a mind that works differently.

The international cast moves through the story without anyone pausing to remark on it, which is its own kind of restraint. The dystopia is geopolitical and technological, all refugee boats and guided missiles, with no environmental allegory to speak of. Religion and messianism hover at the edges, but the film prefers gunfire to sermons, and the moral conflict lands as plot mechanics rather than instruction. We are left with a noisy, derivative science-fiction vehicle that gestures at large ideas and drops them at the door. It is not preaching to us. It is barely speaking.