Credit: Babylon
One of the more highly anticipated films of 2022 is Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, which features an all-star cast that includes Brad Pitt (Jack Conrad), Margot Robbie (Nellie LaRoy), Diego Calva (Manny Torres), Jovan Adepo (Sidney Palmer), Li Jun Li (Lady Fay Zhu), Jean Smart (Elinor St. John), Tobey Maguire (James McKay), and Lukas Haas (George Munn). The upcoming film will explore the glitz of Los Angeles back in what’s considered the golden age of Hollywood: the 1920s. Babylon focuses on the rise and fall of multiple characters, some are fictional, and others are real.
Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie’s characters are reportedly based on Jon Gilbert and Clara Bow; Both are silent-era stars; however, the former’s career fizzled out when talkies started taking over. Bow actually made the successful transition into the roaring Twenties. When it comes to Damien Chazelle’s films, the writer/director is no stranger to capturing beauty in the midst of chaos and tragedy. The Oscar winner has done an excellent job of grounding the humanity of the men and women that he often portrays within his films, and based on the trailer. It appears no different in Babylon. The trailer is bursting with insanity and energy, and who doesn’t want to see Margot Robbie fight a snake?
The exploration of Hollywood is nothing new in the world of filming, but each movie is given a different point of view and what the world was during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Damien Chazelle wanted to explore that in his latest film and how the silent era was vastly affected, “it’s the like story of Los Angeles itself,” The Oscar winner told Entertainment Weekly. He continues by saying as it’s “basically what the early film industry was, this makeshift society that had been built up really fast, in this kind of unbridled, reckless way.” Chazelle even explains why he chose the title, as it was a name to describe Hollywood during that era – the idea of a sinful place, a city of decadence and depravity that was heading to ruin.”
Credit: Babylon
The purpose of highlighting these real-life inspirations was to “take an honest, unvarnished look at the good and the bad of a really seismic shift” through multiple characters in the world of Tinseltown. As you can imagine, the research of this film is what really intrigued Chazelle as he was “trying to map that theme over a broad array of people, and a whole society at large, rather than just a single individual or pair of individuals.”
As great as the trailer looks, the reaction to Babylon has been mixed so far. Some critics as calling the film phenomenal, dazzling, and a high-octane acid trip, whereas several reviewers have called it truly monstrous, an ambitious mess, and demented. The official review embargo has yet to be lifted for the feature, though it sounds like this will make another Oscar potential that turns out to be a divisive beast.
Credit: Babylon
Films such as Blonde or Don’t Worry Darling was once pegged as Oscar hopefuls when their incredible trailers hit, but once these movies were released, they were incredibly mixed, though more in the bad direction. Obviously, we won’t be able to know how good the film is until it’s released in theaters on December 23, 2022.
The weekend before Christmas is typically a busy movie-going experience as other Oscar hopefuls: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (limited theaters first, then Netflix), I Wanna Dance With Somebody, and Corsage are coming out that weekend as well. However, Avatar: The Way of the Water will be released a week prior, which is expectedly to dominate the entire month of December as the first film did.
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