The Movie Babel Movie

The movie Babel was released on October 27, 2006 in New York City. The director of the movie, Alejandro González Iñárritu, is a Mexican film director, producer, screenwriter, and composer. Babel was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director in the 2007 Academy Awards, and they received the Academy Award for Best Original Music Score. The movie tells a story about an accident that connects four different groups of people. It takes place on three different continents, Japan, America and Africa. A Moroccan family, a vacationing American couple in Morocco played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, a mute Japanese teenager and her father, and the Mexican nanny who is in charge of the children of the American couple. These stories are linked to each

The story is written in the Old Testament in the book of Genesis. It is an interesting legend, in which the Lord came down to make people aware of what different languages would do to the society they lived in. The purpose of the story “was to account for the two great phenomena of human society – the distinction of races, and the diversity of language” (“The Tower of Babel” 268). The word Babel means literally ‘confusion of tongues’ in Hebrew. The legend tells that people of a common place who followed the Great Flood migrated from the east and decided to move to the land of Shinar. They all spoke the same language. The Bible tells the story: “All men speak the same language – They build tower of Babel – The Lord confounds their language and scatters them over all the earth” (King James Version, Genesis 11). This is very important to know in order to completely understand the movie and to see what the director wanted for his movie. These four storylines are on three different continents, meaning that these people are all scattered over the earth and they all speak different languages. Consequently after the scattering of these people all over the world, not able to understand each other completely because they cannot communicate and have different beliefs, customs, and different values, which feeds the perception of certain stereotypes, and will eventually lead to misunderstanding. This is exactly what happens in the story and so the title of the movie introduces the theme