Babel · reception & legacy
2006 · Alejandro G. Iñárritu
How Babel has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
In 2006 it was an event — Best Director at Cannes, the Golden Globe for Best Drama, and seven Oscar nominations as a Best Picture frontrunner (it lost to The Departed). Today it's the poster child for mid-2000s 'everything is connected' prestige cinema, and its stock has slid even as the Tokyo strand keeps getting singled out as the great film hiding inside it.
What's debated
The perennial fight: profound global mosaic or self-serious Oscar-bait miserabilism — with a strong side-debate that Rinko Kikuchi's Chieko storyline deserved to be its own movie.
Its footprint
It became shorthand for a whole genre — the sprawling multi-continent hyperlink drama — and the Tokyo nightclub sequence, cutting between pounding music and total silence, remains one of the most referenced scenes of its decade.
Where it stands
A former awards juggernaut turned litmus test — the film cinephiles reach for when arguing about whether the 2000s interconnected-stories wave aged well.