Split Decision · Opening argument 03
Babylon: the case for and against
Three hours of champagne, bodily fluids, film history and self-mythology enter the courtroom wearing almost nothing.
Filed by
CriticWise Editorial
3 minute read · 306 words
The charge
Babylon is charged with confusing excess for insight and velocity for shape. It condemns Hollywood appetite while photographing that appetite with such pleasure that critique and celebration become difficult to separate.
Its defenders consider that contradiction the entire subject: cinema as an industrial machine capable of making transcendent images while consuming the people required to produce them.
The defence
Few recent studio films move with this degree of manic formal confidence. Music, camera movement, parallel action and performance create sequences whose exhilaration is not theoretical; the movie demonstrates the seduction before presenting the cost.
Its tenderness toward forgotten labour gives the spectacle an undertow. For admirers, the unwieldy scale is appropriate to a medium that turns individual lives into collective memory and then misplaces the names.
The prosecution
Repetition wears down the intended shock. Characters can feel like delivery systems for rise-and-fall mythology, and the film’s insistence on topping itself gradually flattens the difference between wonder, disgust and grief.
The concluding montage is either a reckless leap toward cinema itself or an appeal to borrowed greatness. Sceptics see a film asking the history of the medium to finish an emotion its own characters could not fully carry.
The actual taste fault line
Babylon divides viewers who experience maximalism as emotional honesty from those who need contrast before excess can mean anything. It rewards surrender and punishes anyone inclined to audit the argument beat by beat.
The ruling: not guilty by reason of magnificent overreach. That is not the same as flawless. It means the failure and the achievement may be made of the same uncontrollable appetite.
“Babylon’s worst habit and best quality are identical: it does not know when enough has arrived.”
