Babel

There are some movies that are made that start out to show the problems we have in the world and what we should do to solve those problems. Unfortunately this isn't one of them. What this is is a confusing, discombobulated story that starts out fine but 15 minutes into the film and you need a road map to figure out what is exactly going on. The main part of the storyline plays on the stranger in a strange land concept and does it very well, with everything from the environment to the languages that are used you get the full attack on you senses.
When an American female tourist is shot while on vacation, it sets into motion a series of events that span the globe and cross the language barrier repeatedly. The stories that weave this tale together are very intricate and interconnect repetitively throughout the film. The use of the different languages, with the characters not truly understanding the speech around them, works very well to show the disadvantage of not knowing another language. The movie doesn't have a clear starting point, let alone a clear ending, and this is the biggest drawback for it. Even though it is a very highly emotional story the way it jumps around does not give a true handle of what's going on. There is one high point to this film and that's Brad Pitt's performance as the American father in Morocco, he plays an older character with wrinkled skin and graying hair and does it extremely well.
This was by far one of the most disconnected films I've watched in a long time, I was hoping for an intelligent straightforward film, but what I got was a puzzle that I had to put together backwards. There were some parts of the film that were good but unless there is a strong story that's going in one direction to connect them all what you end up with is a jumble and who wants to spend two and half hours trying to figure out a jumble. I'm sure when they came up with the idea of using the biblical Tower of Babel story it sounded like it would work very well, but even in the Bible the story has a beginning and an end and goes straight through from one to the other.