First things first, Babylon is a crazy and wild ride of a movie. That is the first thing I said when I came out of the theater. This movie was absolutely wild. There was so much going on all at once yet you knew exactly what was going on. I was super excited when I saw the first trailer for this movie. I didn’t even know what the actual plot was, I just cared about the actors and actresses in it. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Tobey Maguire and Diego Calva all had one of their best performances that I have seen in a long time.
Babylon is about the film industry in the 1920s and how it evolved from silent movies into the movie we know and love today that has actors speaking and talking. It mainly follows a female lead named Nellie LaRoy played by Margot Robbie where she is a very promiscuous actress trying to find her way into Hollywood. This character was based on real life actress Clara Bow but director Damien Chazelle changed her up a little bit, so it became more a fictional story. I tend to enjoy movies a little more when they do this. I don’t mind non-fiction or biopics, but I like it more when the director and screenwriters change things up a bit to tell a slightly different story. Her character was the main lead.
This movie also did well in telling the story of a few other characters such as Brad Pitt’s character Jack Conrad and Diego Calva’s Manny Torres. Pitt’s character Jack was an extremely popular actor in his time of silent films. However, as the years go on, he starts to notice his popularity and fame dwindle down. Calva’s character Manny Torres starts as a nobody that anyone has heard about but then becomes one of the more known directors of Hollywood.
Another amazing part of the mobile that I want to bring up is the score. The music in the film is absolutely amazing. I instantly went to search for the soundtrack on Spotify and I was listening to it for quite some time after seeing the movie. I think some of those songs perfectly describe this movie. Some songs are wild and upbeat, while others are slower and almost tell a story. In this film, there were crazy parts but also loving and heartwarming parts.
I saw this movie after seeing Avatar: The Way of Water, so I knew I was going to go see back-to-back 3-hour movies. However, again Babylon did not feel like a 3-hour movie. Some parts were a little slow, but they were important for the plot and didn’t bother me that much. My eyes were pretty much glued to the screen the entire time. Each side plot has a different yet amazing story to tell and none of it shied away from the truth. The ending of this movie almost brought tears to my eyes. The story of Nellie, Jack and Manny was going in a direction that I did not expect. And the montage at the end is just something you need to see to feel it.
