SpikyTurtle

Review contains some spoilers: This is going to be a short review/rant about Babylon. I remember when the first 3 episodes came out everyone was impressed since this show had amazing cinematography and direction, a dark and thrilling atmosphere and the story was executed seemingly very well. It continued to be quite good until the 7th episode, then it had a long break and everything went to shit. Babylon would have been great if if was just a political thriller with mystery elements. But the suicide law going worldwide and the law in general ruined the show. It is just very unrealistic that people would react to thislaw in such a way (similar laws already exist), the politicians are portrayed very poorly and every decision made in the 2nd half of the show just makes no sense. The discussion that occured in the summit was portrayed as "deep" although it really wasn't, politicians should leave philosophy for actual famous and talented philosophers. Magase is obviously the actual danger, that can bring doom to humanity, but she became just a subplot for most of the 2nd half. The main aspect of this show - the suicide law just fails as a plot point, since it really doesn't matter because Magase Ai can just persuade literally anyone to kill themselves. All in all, at the start this show seemed quite profound and well-executed, but really it was pretentious, extremely unrealistic and absurd. My and many people's expectations were shattered by this show, but I'd still recommend watching the first 7 episodes. One or two eps were pretty exceptional, therefore I'm giving Babylon the rating of 3/10 - overall it's a really bad show, but has a few remarkable moments.

SingleH

This review is best consumed pretending you hadn’t just seen the score it’s headed with. This one’s going to be real prosaic, because Babylon is a very dense, logically tight show for adults in a way you don’t often see in media, especially anime, and is certainly not for people even among older audiences who cannot keep up with sociopolitical factions and legal jargon, as it is a premiere example of a political thriller, a genre both elusive in the medium and almost never laudably delivered on therein or out. Every facet of the show is oozing with a thick sense of seriousness and often boils downto a lot of very grave talk amongst crotchety middle-aged politicians and civil servants trying to solve real crime, all of which is presented without a lick of fun or funniness. It’s exciting simply because it operates on the very generous assumption you, the viewer, are mature and worldly enough to recognize the implications of what’s happening in the story are really serious in a hyper-realistic fashion, and the fact the world is established such that that sense of realism is actually believable, the events play out like urgent breaking news as opposed to the writings of an inherently fictitious narrative. Where Babylon becomes something of a masterwork, though, is in its functionality as a mystery. Like any good political thriller, Babylon is rife with juicy machinations behind the scenes and moving parts to obfuscate them, but unlike most so-called mystery box narratives which string you along offering nothing but minuscule and minute information only at times convenient for the writers—which you could’ve very well gotten at any moment—until it’s all over and the contents of the box turn out to be ultimately unsatisfying, Babylon continually gives you specific and totally gratifying answers to questions you have, thusly reassuring you of the show’s ability to deliver on its promises, and packaged within those answers lie details of an even large mystery to come to light, so—at the same time—you’re fulfilled momentarily whilst continually intrigued with what the hell else is going on. And while Babylon opens itself with the heavy task of untangling this mess of clues and conclusions, the reason the situation is so complicated is every player is operating of their own accord, so whilst the narrative is never dizzyingly convoluted, it is very complex, even though it soon reveals itself to be one of the shows which has you slowly realize less of it is actually a conspiracy than you may’ve first thought. Babylon takes place in the city of Shiniki, the self-proclaimed testing ground for nations, a special administrative zone just north of Tokyo who's mission statement is to decentralize the Japanese economic center away from the overburdened Tokyo metroplex while also instating a new city with little regulation where laws are both easy to pass and easy to terminate, hence the tagline. Our main character, Seizaki Zen, is a public prosecutor who finds himself investigating a string of apparently related incidents of political sex trafficking being used to influence elections in the city, and it doesn’t take long for him and the viewer to come to the cold realization these cases are merely the tip of the iceberg of a thoroughly deep rooted scandal, which is to say—minor spoilers from here on—the police are in cahoots with the corrupt politicians. As Seizaki is lured into the conspirators' camp by the fact they’re work rigging elections is actually—no matter how rigorously illegal their actions are—for the greater good of stabilizing Shiniki’s still shaky political sphere and finally giving the city an identity of its own as the aforementioned legal envelope pusher, the puppet candidate they’re working to instate in office suddenly cuts ties with his fellow conspirators the second he’s elected and announces—unbeknownst to them and in complete and utter surprise to all their plans—his first new law to define the courageous new world which this city was always meant to be: the Suicide Law, the right to kill yourself. And what follows is the single most cinematically genius use of mass media spectacle I’ve seen in any anime ever. The already blood pumping, philosophically stimulating narrative of Babylon proceeds by stacking plot twists in such a way you’re constantly shocked, with every episode having some element which radically changes your perception of the events so far, all while the scale of said narrative keeps widening and widening, with every conversation adding some kind of information and the scripting continuously parceling out information in such a way which is integral to the storytelling’s engrossing identity, keeping us viewers absolutely intoxicated. Itsuki Kaika, the upstart mayor heading the Suicide Law, was chosen by the conspiring faction to be the puppet leader because of his young and refreshing image first and foremost, but also because he personally brought in the women they used to influence policy with sex and set their entire initiative into motion in the first place. As the conspirators in the challenging political parties and police headquarters, now including Seizaki, have to deal with their rouge masterless puppet, Seizaki is let in on some of the secrets they’d been keeping from him from when he was in the dark, one of which being the sinister fact all the women they’d been trafficking—including one sugar baby he himself had interrogated when previously working the case—was actually one person, one person named Magase Ai. As the show continues on and the narrative undergoes paradigm shift after paradigm shift, it quickly becomes apparent Magase Ai is much more urgent a threat than Itsuki ever was and is also hinted to even have some enigmatic occult afflictions. And before you turn away thinking a supernatural twist would ruin a straight-faced and thickly realistic narrative, remember plot devices as genius as The Voice of the City from Texhnolyze or The Black Blob from Paranoia Agent and remind yourself magical realism can be instated smartly into serious and mature stories. I’ll stop spoiling things now hoping my hinting at this character is motivation enough to go watch the show yourself, because she is a case study on presence and easily among the most electric personalities ever put to animation and says some thematically profound things about the nature of femininity and the allure and logical extreme of sexual release. And speaking of animation, her character design is iconic, her theme is enchanting, and again, her presence is simply immense. With that said, while I’m at it, the show as a whole is quite something from a production standpoint itself. The aesthetics are not particularly appealing, and the animation isn’t consistently beautiful or anything, but if it was trying to look like a hyper-realistic human narrative taking place in the real world, it succeeded wholeheartedly. It boasts god tier music which was absolutely nail biting at times, and it staffed talented character animators like Kouki Fujimoto who delivered on the most thrilling breaking points of the story with all due flair and terror. And all this isn’t even going into the excellent and outright laudably ambitious directing fit with more memorable imagery and exquisitely shot visual metaphors than you could ever ask for. Honestly, any way you slice it, Babylon is something of a modern masterpiece. … … … In Spring of 2017, an original anime by the name of Seikaisuru Kado went to air. It was a modest little thing, at least on production, made by Toei Animation, the premiere home for long running Saturday Morning Cartoon shlock and pandering game adaptations. My crude and irrelevant derision aside, though, Seikaisuru Kado not only looks and feels nothing like a project out of Toei, but it also looks and feels quite like nothing I’ve ever seen before for many reasons. Be it the quasi-CG character animation production, the irreplaceably unique concepts to accompany an alien invasion, or the hundred-ton dialogue scripting swamped in international relations of all things, Seikaisuru Kado was certainly a diamond in the rough, even if a thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly unpolished one. While it fashioned far more comedic relief and character emotions than necessary for a work of its apparent type—unlike Babylon wherein the characters are mature adults who are taking the story very seriously at all times—Seikaisuru Kado was first and foremost a fairly smart, talkative narrative of political intrigue. To avoid alienating what little of you are still reading by further narrating a show you’re not here to learn about, I’ll sum up the experience by saying it was brilliant…for six episodes…then it was annoying for the following two…and then it was a corpse by the end of episode nine. It was intelligently structured and adherent to reality even amongst all its inane sci-fi concepts, and it kept building itself until by even halfway though I was ready to tout it as a downright intellectual giant. However, it soon began devolving under the surface, and sooner later snapped like a twig in the most bracing twist of quality in anime history. A more-than-average mature show about the advancement of humanity and international geopolitical negotiations behind such progress was put to death by the draw of a giant energy sworn swinging the story into a downwards spiral of over-the-top mindless action, aliens VS humans battle to the death, fucking daughter from the future, batshit anime insanity, and the entire merit of the work up until that point was squandered instantaneously. And its author…wrote Babylon. At first, Babylon’s only real weakness was in the fact it attracts losers like myself. When you reach the stage of consumerism wherein your priorities become tone-deaf and your intentions become incorrigibly cynical, media—no matter how innocent in its attempts to entertain you—will find themselves endlessly, hopelessly, relentlessly attacked by your unconscious will to break something down, as you’ve conditioned your mind to be little more than a machine for critique which can only even begin to allow yourself an inch of entertainment from media which is totally infallible on every level, as you now know what it means to be so. And Babylon is not totally infallible. Babylon, much like Seikaisuru Kado, even before that heinous death blow the series dealt to itself which I just described, suffers from authorial projecting. That’s a nothing piece of terminology I just made up on the spot, but I mean it to imply exactly what it sounds like. Nozaki Mado, the creator of both works, quite frankly seems to fancy himself more of a preacher than a writer. His works so far have been bursting at the seems with unforgivingly unsubtle theming to the point of characters sitting down and spelling them out to the audience just to make sure his oh-so-precious point got across in the specific way he wanted it to. Honestly, as paradoxical as it sounds given the (periodic) maturity of his works, Nozaki seems to me to be thoroughly childish. Whereas the episodes wherein they do so and the degree to which they do so differ per show, both works reach a point around halfway through where the show takes all its ambivalent ideation and starts facing the audience directly and asserting these inherently subjective questions actually have objectively correct answers, because morals and God and shit. The works reach another turning point later on, though, towards the end, where the show completely shatters itself, and while, no, there is no giant energy sword in Babylon, the series does get to a point by the penultimate episode where anyone thinking at all critically simply has to put it down. That’s right. This masterpiece died young. How anime which seem to so thoroughly understand the ways of the world lead themselves on with such delusions as evolutionary providence in Seikaisuru Kado and now a moral death in Babylon, I honestly will never know. I don’t get it, and now that we’re two for two with this guy, I frankly don’t even want to. Nozaki isn’t a writer the likes of Tow Ubukata, who hides the interworking of his concepts with an ostentatiously stylized exterior only to eventually expose their emptiness after its clear nothing is being said, nor is he like Shou Aikawa, who presents transparently style-over-substance codifications on behalf of potential themes which also end up being ultimately meaningless all the same. He presents concepts which do, indeed, payoff, and he continues to do so expertly, only for the process to devolve somewhere along the line and have the ideas stop churning out intellectual content and begin churning out holier than thou horse shit attempting to convince you of pretentiously figured objective answers to subjective moral questions. It’s like the latter ends of his works are written by an entirely different person with an entirely different set of priorities and personal values. On its way down from a thematically enormous wonder of a political thriller to a boilerplate pseudo-psychological character study, Babylon doesn’t break any one character, nor does it defile the established ideas, and it only really disrupts the tangible plot in the final episode and, I suppose, the cliffhanger leading into it. It only wastes itself in a general sense, so unlike Seikaisuru Kado who’s devolution wholly invalidates all merit it had accumulated up until the point the energy blade came out, Babylon is actually worth watching in a sense. In fact, you could probably just watch the first seven episodes as a complete story like all the brilliant bastards who dropped Death Note after episode twenty five. But do so knowing it continues. Know the following three and a half episodes slam on the breaks and attempt to convince you of the strict, objectivist take on the previously ambivalent, thought-provoking seven episode gem you just saw. And know, as well, the following episode and a half remaining after that turn out a finale which you’d never guess, not even in your wildest dreams, could ever have been derivative of the expert craft with which you began your viewing. Thank you for reading.