Babylon A.D.
Mary Mother of (twin) Christs. It’s an “adaptation” of the escape from Egypt, where Mary is played by Michelle Yeoh and Joseph by Vin Diesel. But Baby Jesus is actually Mary, it’s confusing.
This follows Toroop (Poorot backwards? I’m missing something, but everyone spells it differently anyway), but I’ll call him Joe(seph). Joe is a carpenter, I mean, mercenary assassin, and gets recruited by Gabriel, I mean, Gerard Depardieu, to escort a girl to America. To keep her pure and virginal, she has a chaperone, Michelle Yeoh.
The trip goes pretty well, considering they go from Uzbekistan to Vladivostok, Canada, New York. When catching a train our Baby Jesus predicts a suicide bombing, after seeing some cloned tigers. On Vladivostok, they have to kick people into the frozen sea to get to the nuclear sub crossing the Bering Strait. As illegal aliens in Alaska, they need to dodge Predator drones and kill their backstabbing smuggler “friend”.
But by that time, the three are a big family unit. As they reach New York, something straight out of Blade Runner, they meet their new antagonist: the CEO of the church of the noelites. With that name, I was expectations they worshipped the pagan Christmas holiday.
Alas, they are just a church-based megacorp, headed by female Elon Musk equivalent Charlotte Rampling. Like Zardoz, she had the breeding blues, and wants the virgin mother to bump her religion into bona-fide territory, an upgraded from Scientology to Christianity. There is also another faction, the Baby Jesus’ father, the tech wizards, bringing about the revelation with AI-powered singularity.
The core family avoids handing over Baby Jesus to the church by shooting up the pickup limo, but Mary perishes in the process. Baby Jesus goes into hiding and Joe is brought back to life with robotic prosthetics, after a massive explosion of military ordnance. His dying memory holds the location of her hiding spot.
Six months later, Baby Jesus has her virginal birth, and twin Jesuses are born. She dies immediately, leaving our robo-Joeseph as their only parent. Maybe he will settle down in that shack and teach them to use a saw, a router, and a biscuit joiner.
I liked this film, but Vin Diesel lacks the necessary range for this. He can only grimace, not properly emote. Should have been Nikolai Coster-Waldau, or Sam Worthington, for actors at a similar age.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.