Science Fiction movies have always had a big problem: most Science Fiction movies are adapted from Science Fiction books, and this isn’t exactly a good thing. Science fiction novels and graphic novels tend to have very ambitious storylines full of intricate plot. Characters have complex motivations and relationships and frequently, things are not always as they seem. This is great in a book, but in a movie this results in a lot of plot and character development getting cut out in order for the movie to actually run in less than six hours.

Babylon A.D. is a perfect example of how ugly things can get when this happens. The movie is based on the novel Babylon Babies by French musician-turned-author Maurice Dantec. The original novel is a very elaborately developed exploration of genetic experimentation in a world that has fractured along every conceivable social boundary.

Unfortunately, almost all of the complex characterization and plot development are lost on the film. Hugo Toorop (Vin Diesel) is an expatriate American mercenary trapped in Eastern Europe. Unable to return home due to a criminal record, he is approached by a local warlord and offered a new identity in return for delivering a young girl named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) to New York. Accompanied by her guardian nun Sister Rebecca (Michelle Yeoh), they fight their way across Siberia and Canada into New York, where things predictably turn out to be more complicated than expected and Toorop has to decide where his loyalties really lie.

Rating:

Starring: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Mélanie Thierry

Directed by: Mathieu Kassovitz

Written by: Eric Besnard, adapted from “Babylon Babies” by Maurice G. Dantec

For starters, there’s no particular acting involved in this movie. The roles of Toorop and Rebecca are tailor-written for their actors. You know pretty much everything there is to know about them as soon as you’ve seen their opening scenes: Diesel’s entrance striding ominously through a Russian arms bazaar and Rebecca glaring fiercely at a looming Diesel telling him what the rules are going to be on their trip. I’m fairly certain that the only reason Yeoh was cast is so that the entire audience would instantly know that Sister Rebecca is a Bad-Ass Nun. Eventually she does do some Kung-Fu, but it’s shot in such a way that they didn’t really need someone with her skill to do it. They could have cast Michelle Pfeiffer and it still would have looked fine.

The main problem is that almost all of the storyline explaining who the characters are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and why it’s important have all been cut in order to make room for the action scenes. There’s no particular explanation of why Toorop suddenly gets protective of the girl he’d described not ten minutes before as “just a package”. The explanation of why Aurora is important is so poorly presented that the movie would have been better off had they just left it a mystery. The ending is equally abrupt, meaningless, and confusing.

This is all the more disappointing because the first half of the movie is practically dripping with promise. We can tell that Toorop, Rebecca, and Aurora are Interesting People. Big Stuff is Going Down, and we want to understand what it’s all about. Movies like this are all about setting up the Big Mystery and then revealing it to gasps of amazement, but Babylon A.D.’s denouement is so poorly done that we’re sorry we ever wanted to know in the first place.

In fact, I’m fairly certain that most of this stuff was in the screenplay and even got filmed, but wound up on the cutting room floor. Indeed, director Mathieu Kassovitz has been extremely critical of 20th Century Fox for removing his creative control over the movie once filming was over and cutting in it in such a way that it was “pure violence and stupidity”.

I guess the lesson here is that Science Fiction novels generally make poor movies. The source material is usually so intricate and complex that it just won’t pack into a two hour format without completely losing everything that made it interesting in the first place. It says something that most of the highest profile novel-to-movie adaptations turn out mediocre at best (Dune, Contact), while most of the really good science fiction movies are either written directly for the screen (The Matrix, Gattaca), or are adapted from short stories (Minority Report, Blade Runner).

If I’m right that all the good stuff was actually filmed, we may yet see a director’s cut that does the source material justice, but until then, you’re better off reading the book.