Babel

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu seems to have an interest in complicated, inter-woven stories of despair and sticky, unhappy endings. His latest film, Babel, is no exception. It is set over the course of just a few days, but in three different geographical areas, focusing on several different seemingly unconnected families.
I understand that the point of the film is to show how connected everyone in the world is in small and large ways, and I thought it was fairly interesting to watch at points, but I did not find myself blown away, like several people I talked to were. Was it all that original? Was it all that powerful? Frankly I found other films that featured the interconnectedness of virtual strangers, like Love Actually, more interesting and enjoyable. Maybe this is really simplistic, and maybe it is because I am a sucker for English rom-coms, but I guess I would rather see Colin Firth learning how to say "My god, I have a terrible stomachache. It must have been the prawns!" in Portuguese and Hugh Grant shaking his ass to the Pointer Sisters than Gael Garcia Bernal abandoning his aunt in the desert and Brad Pitt playing the insensitive, racist upper-class white American male.
I could see that the acting by all was very well done, and the editing (a tricky thing in films like this) was also well-executed as I was very able to keep on track with what was happening even though the scenes cut among various times and spaces very haphazardly and quickly. However, at the end I found myself thinking "So what?" I found Babel to be a well-made film, but for me it wasn't quite enough to hold my interest to really think about it much past the viewing of it.