Everyone is not the enemy

Babel is a film of overwhelming depth and power, a truly miraculous achievement. It takes 3 seemingly unrelated stories and weaves them together in such a masterful way, in such a compelling way, to where you find yourself deeply invested emotionally in these peoples' situations without actually realizing when you begin caring - it's done so seamlessly, it just 'creeps up' on you, subtly and organically.

The film is not just ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, either. (And it is exceedingly ambitious, with the 3 stories taking place all over the map.) There is genuine depth here, real characters in all their humanity, and the ultimate achievement is indeed on the purest human level. There's an astounding amount of political subtext going on - some stated, some implied, some even more subtly inferred - but the film, in the end, is not about any of it. It's the human element that's at the core of this masterpiece - it's as humans, after all, that we are connected, regardless of our cultural, race, class and/or intellectual differences. Babel, like 21 Grams before it, is a film that most assuredly knows where the heart is located.