Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is not so much a film as it is a kaleidoscopic explosion—a fever dream of excess, debauchery, and desperate ambition. Starring Margot Robbie as the magnetic yet self-destructive Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva as the wide-eyed, opportunistic Manny Torres, Babylon charts the rise and fall of Hollywood’s silent-era dreamers as they scramble to adapt to the seismic shift into the age of sound.
If La La Land was Chazelle’s love letter to the romance of showbiz, Babylon is his cautionary tale. It opens with a jaw-dropping, 30-minute party sequence—a wild free-for-all of champagne fountains, live snakes, and hedonistic chaos. It’s shocking, audacious, and utterly compelling, setting the tone for the rollercoaster of triumph and tragedy that follows. Chazelle’s direction is relentless, careening from outrageous comedy to heart-wrenching drama, leaving the audience as breathless as his characters. The scenes are very art house in their nature and are a slog to watch most of the time, no t8me in this centure has this been seen.
Margot Robbie is electrifying as Nellie, a Jersey girl with star power in her veins and a penchant for self-destruction. She delivers a performance of feral energy, swaggering through wild dance numbers and emotionally raw breakdowns with equal aplomb. Robbie’s Nellie is both a tragic figure and a force of nature, embodying Hollywood’s addictive allure and inevitable burnout. She plays the part so well it makes this movie watchable.
Diego Calva, in his breakout role, anchors the film with quiet charisma as Manny, a man consumed by his own dreams of success. Brad Pitt, meanwhile, is at his most charmingly melancholic as Jack Conrad, a silent film megastar wrestling with irrelevance in the sound era.
Chazelle, never one for subtlety, bombards the senses with Justin Hurwitz’s thunderous jazz score, jaw-dropping cinematography by Linus Sandgren, and production design that is both grotesquely opulent and gloriously immersive. Yet for all its spectacle, Babylon also has moments of genuine pathos, particularly in its exploration of Hollywood as a relentless machine, chewing up its stars and spitting them out.
At three hours, the film’s long oh so long and some sequences verge on self-indulgence. But Babylon’s audacity is also its strength. It’s a love letter and a poison pen note to cinema, an operatic exploration of ambition and the cost of greatness it sounds its time bringing history however real to life. It’s style is of the time is the best way to say it, the movie is very long for the average user anc there is nothing wrong with watching this in parts though that may detract from the overall feel.
Verdict: Chazelle swings for the fences with Babylon, and while it won’t be for everyone, its audacious spirit and career-best performances from Robbie and Calva make it a must-watch for those willing to embrace its chaos.
Rating for its cinematic grace and cinematography it’s a 4/5 for a engaging movie 3/5
