Review of Babylon A.D. (2008) by Chads. — 29 Aug 2008

There's more than one way to skin a cat, except when you skin a cat for the expressed intention of processing the cat as meat, which in that case, there is actually only one way to skin a cat: with a sharp knife.

Nobody knocks anymore in post-apocalyptical Eastern Europe, knocking is for p******. Toorop(Vin Diesel) never finishes his cat and glass of red wine; the home invasion took care of that. "Babylon A.

D." asks the question, "Guess who's coming to dinner?" "Children of Men", that's who. Two nuns accompany the mercenary to America, non-Judeo Christian nuns, who could topple the dominant religion should Aurora's secret package fall in the hands of the High Preistess(Charlotte Rampling).

"Babylon A.D.", intentional or not, endorses the ruiling theology by using film and its bane, product placement, as an analogy. Product placement, to some, is an affront to cinema, whose true believers attest to the celluloidal image as having a religiosity, albeit a secularized one.

The filmmaker not-so-subtly expresses his disdain for the Coca-Cola brand name plastered on an airliner, by having his star walk past two dead polar bears(remember the commercial in which the white Arctic mammals stare at the aurora borealis?).

Both product placement and Aurora(Melanie Thierry) have an intertextuality that threatens each respective belief systems. Aurora's condition blasphemizes the Old Testament, which is why she has to go out the same ways as the bears.