Plot- You’re doing it wrong.

There seems to be an occupational hazard in SF movies, to start well— great premise/character/setting— and go completely off the rails in the third act. This may be due to the fact that film is a primarily visual medium, and sometimes, when trying to tie a story onto the visual set-pieces, the writing lags behind. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes, again because film is a visual medium, a given movie can get away with the sight overwhelming the sense, movies like Sunshine and most of the Star Wars franchise after Empire Strikes Back. Sometimes, though, after a good start, and some decent writing, a WTF third act just dropkicks a movie through the goalposts of bad. Hancock suffered this issue in spades, to the point where you can pick out the exact frame where the movie tumbled into the abyss.

Babalyon AD is another one of these movies. The following rant will be spoileriffic, so stop reading now if you care about things like that.

It starts out promising, showing a war-torn central Asia that plausible enough to be scary. For a while it seems that we’re going to see an action-movie take on the kind of gritty realist dystopia we saw in Children of Men. Unfortunately, the comparisons with that better movie don’t end there, as much as it turns out we wish it did.

The set-up is standard SF dystopia plot #235. Jaded loner is reluctantly hired to move special person through nastiness. Nothing wrong with a stock plot, it’s worked in a lot of films from Serenity to Gauntlet. However, for Babalyon AD, the problems come when we find out why this person is special, and who hired our hero, and who’s been trying to screw with the delivery.

Now a genetically engineered virgin birth sponsored by a synthetic church is a cool idea, especially when there’re signs it might be a real miracle. But can someone tell me why, if the people ordering the miracle baby believe it is actually a hoax, why would they go to all the trouble? I could see pulling out the stops if they believed they were building a messiah. I could see, likewise, if she was a beta version, that the church might want to pull her back in to avoid some questions. I do not see expending the resources to manufacture a fake messiah— we have those all the time, without wasting the mad science skilz.

Speaking of waste, our neo-virgin Mary sparks the ultimate gunfight in NYC by coming out and saying, “If you hand me over to the church, they’ll kill me.” Say what?!? Did the writers read the script? These are the same people who hired our morally ambiguous hero to smuggle this woman into the US. Worse, these are the same people who fired a missile into the convent she came from. If they wanted her dead, why remove her from the convent before they blew it up? Or why didn’t they hire our smuggler to pop a cap in her? And why are they spending all this ad time announcing her arrival? Sense. . . Not. . . Making. . . Head. . . Hurt. . .

Here’s another nonsensical plot point. Our hero has to smuggle our Miracle Mama through blatantly life-threatening passages to get to North America, alone. However, as hermetically sealed as the border is, some of the same characters show up on both sides of this airtight border, and certainly both factions have ample personnel on both continents. This implies they have better ways to transport goods and services than to hire our loose-cannon hero— especially since he was the only one of the trio running this gauntlet that needed a forged passport.

What the hell is with the whole “if you’re carrying a virus I have to kill you?” Where were they going with that? If it’s a red herring, it stinks like one. Oh, and thanks for solidifying the whole plastic surgery is eeeeevil trope. And how is it the Ebil Church Lady can only track down Miracle Mama’s father once the plot requires it? Subtlety wasn’t his strong suit. (Let’s make the grab in a public bar, unarmed, in the midst of a few hundred drunken Russians. What could go wrong?) And, you’re going to hide your daughter from the Ebil Church Lady, so you sequester her in a convent run by her church. Huh. What?

I get the feeling the movie would have been loads better if they just didn’t try to “explain” anything.