First of all, Iñárritu's film certainly doesn't lack in scope. While I do think that altogether a bit it's overrated, I very, very much enjoyed the globe-spanning reach of Babel. The whole "everything is connected!" theme has been (in my opinion) beat to death, but Babel does manage to pull it off somehow. This is counterbalanced in my opinion by a continuous frustration that I felt with the characters because of the continuous stupid decisions they made, seemingly only to create more dramatic tension. But despite these plot driven character decisions , I thought that Babel was still somehow grounded in a reality that you seldom see in film. There's an attention paid to locations and cultures that's far superior to most Hollywood films. So in all good but not great, mainly due to my frustrations with plot.