I've been watching...

Usually, as all thinking human beings, after reading a book, listening to music or watching a film, I make my own decisions as to whether I like what I just experienced or not. This time, I need to admit not without embarrassment, I needed to look through other reviews before writing my own. I am not going to use them as none of them describes my feelings towards “Babel” by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. And that is the point of this film – to leave the audience confused and not sure what to think. For that - I congratulate. I’m just not sure.
First of all, it’s all about film-making this time. Inarritu has shown in 21 Grams and in Amorres Perros that he can make films in new, his own, forward-thinking way. But why does he need to keep proving it to all of us? Yes, he is a good director. Great. But maybe it’s about time he concentrated on the story and the characters in it. Because this time round he got lost. At the beginning I believed that it was done purposely – to build the tension, to make us more interested and to get different points of view of the situation. Well, I think I was mistaken. The plot has vanished as soon as the Mexican nephew deserted the scene and neither of them came back till the end...
Let’s say it: this movie is too long. It doesn’t mean it’s boring; it’s just too complicated. The best part of it – the story in Japan, could have been a separate film itself, and as the stories in Mexico and Morocco did not lose out too much, Chieko could have definitely been made a protagonist in a wonderful picture about her and her relationships with the world only. Here, she appears, she has problems, she gets upset and we lose her every twenty minutes to move to some other country, other people, other problems. Not fair.
I have never seen anything with so many merital errors! Seriously – do you not need to check your facts before making a film?!
At the end of the day, it all can be forgiven because this film is quite ok. That’s what so surprising about it – you don’t have a feeling that you just wasted last three hours. But you do wonder why you don’t have this feeling...
Some scenes are simply unreal. But in this unrealistic world, you doubt in what is written in stone and what is actually possible to happen. That’s why you get drawn in into this soap-opera of languages.
I’m still not sure whether to give it thumbs up or thumbs down. I’m just not sure.