Babble on in Babylon
We haven't rewatched KASSOVITZ's
La Haine, a French movie that did mark its era due to its topic -suburbian boredom- and its dialogue made of suburbian talk which got very quickly recycled and mocked by tons of French TV programs. So we cannot tell how it did age. But what's sure is the failure of KASSOVITZ's
Babylon A.D.. The movies is an adaptation of DANTEC's sci-fi book which at the time benefited from a hype by French litteray critics as a major litterary work. But whereas in the book the will to conceptualize everything made it too blur the adaptation we have on view seems like oversimplified. The directors criticizes the Hollywood system for having destroyed his vision but this doesn't excuse everything. Especially the miscasts in the movie -DEPARDIEU, RAMPLING-, the average performance of Vin DIESEL and the bad english acting of Mélanie THIERRY. Or the catastrophic score and the lack of real editing work for action scenes. One more proof that France hasn't produced a major genre cinema director since MELVILLE.