Ray Breslin is a former prosecutor who co-owns Breslin-Clark, a Los Angeles–based security firm specializing in testing the reliability of maximum security prisons. He spends his life getting into prisons to study their designs and the guards' habits to find and exploit their weaknesses, thus enabling him to escape without a hitch or a victim. His goal is to ensure that criminals sent to prison stay inside by eliminating the weakness of every prison; Breslin's wife and child were murdered by an escaped convict he had successfully prosecuted.
Babel focuses on four interrelated sets of situations and characters, and many events are revealed out of sequence. The following plot summary has been simplified and thus does not reflect the exact sequence of the events on screen.
Munich begins with a depiction of the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics and then cuts to the home of Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir, where Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, is chosen to lead an assassination mission against 11 Palestinians allegedly involved in the massacre. To give the Israeli government plausible deniability and at the direction of his handler Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), Avner resigns from Mossad and operates with no official ties to Israel. His team includes four Jewish volunteers from around the world: South African driver Steve (Daniel Craig), Belgian toy-maker and explosives expert Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), former Israeli soldier and "cleaner" Carl (Ciarán Hinds), and a Danish document forger named Hans (Hanns Zischler). They are given information by a shadowy French informant, Louis (Mathieu Amalric).
Infuriated by belittlements, Queen Cleopatra makes a deal with Julius Caesar: if the Egyptians build a palace larger than Caesar's palace in Rome in three months, he must acknowledge that Egypt was the greatest of nations. To perform this task, Cleopatra hires the architect Numerobis, on pain of death and much to the dismay of Pyradonis, Cleoptara's customary architect. He and his secretary Papyris discuss the druid Getafix (Panoramix in the original French), whose potion empowers its drinkers; and Numerobis goes in search of him.
Divorcee Lauren Reynolds (Drew Barrymore), who has two sons, Brendan (Braxton Beckham) and Tyler (Kyle Red Silverstein), meets Jim Friedman (Adam Sandler), a widower with three daughters, Hilary (Bella Thorne), Espn (Emma Fuhrmann), and Lou (Alyvia Alyn Lind) on a blind date. The date ends in a disaster due to Jim's clumsy and careless attitude and Lauren's perfectionist nature along with the fact that they have their date at Hooters.
Pharaoh Rameses I of Egypt has ordered the death of all firstborn Hebrew males after hearing the prophecy of the Deliverer, but a Hebrew woman named Yoshebel saves her infant son by setting him adrift in a basket on the Nile. Bithiah, the Pharaoh's daughter, who had recently lost her husband and the hope of ever having children of her own, finds the basket and decides to adopt the boy even though her servant, Memnet, recognizes the child is Hebrew and protests.
On 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster Prison after having spent 27 years in jail. Four years later, Mandela is elected the first black President of South Africa. His presidency faces enormous challenges in the post-Apartheid era, including rampant poverty and crime, and Mandela is particularly concerned about racial divisions between black and white South Africans, which could lead to violence. The ill will which both groups hold towards each other is seen even in his own security detail where relations between the established white officers, who had guarded Mandela's predecessors, and the black ANC additions to the security detail, are frosty and marked by mutual distrust.
The film begins with a prologue set in Richmond, Virginia in 1865, showing the ironclad CSS Texas, carrying the last of the Confederacy's treasury, as Captain Mason Tombs tries to run a Union blockade.
James Bond—agent 007—pursues Ernst Stavro Blofeld and eventually finds him at a facility where Blofeld look-alikes are being created through surgery. Bond kills a test subject, and later the "real" Blofeld, by drowning him in a pool of superheated mud.
Over the course of a calendar year, Earth takes the viewer on a journey from the North Pole in January to the South in December, revealing how plants and animals respond to the power of the sun and the changing seasons. The film focuses on three particular species, the polar bear, African bush elephant and humpback whale.
In response to a record high crime rate in Johannesburg, the South African government purchases a squadron of state-of-the-art, armour-plated attack robots from weapons manufacturer Tetravaal, developed by Deon Wilson. A competing project is the remotely controlled MOOSE, developed by soldier-turned-engineer Vincent Moore. Deon is praised for Tetravaal's success but Vincent grows jealous when the police are unwilling to give his heavy weapons platform equal attention. At home, Deon creates a prototype artificial intelligence that mimics a human mind to the point of feeling emotions and having opinions, but Tetravaal CEO Michelle Bradley refuses to let him test the A.I. on a police robot. Undeterred, Deon steals a recently damaged robot before it is destroyed and puts it in his van, along with the "guard key" needed to update the robot's software. On his way home, he is kidnapped by a group of gangsters, Ninja, Yolandi, and Amerika, who threaten to kill him unless he reprograms a police robot to fight for them. Deon installs the new software into the damaged robot, which responds with childlike terror upon powering up. Deon and Yolandi calm the robot, teaching it words and naming it "Chappie". Despite Deon wanting to stay with the robot, Ninja forces him out of their hideout.
In Central Park Zoo, Samson the Lion tells his son Ryan stories of his adventures in the wild. That night, when the zoo closes, all the animals are free to roam. Samson, Benny, Bridget, Larry, and Nigel were in a turtle curling championship while Ryan was with his friends. Ryan accidentally alerts the Thompson Gazelles which head to the game. Samson and Ryan have a falling-out about the fact that Ryan can't roar and Ryan storms off, even though his father was sorry for what he said. Benny insists that Samson tells the truth to Ryan or he will lose his son. When Samson goes to talk to him, he is not home. Ryan has actually walked into a green box and accidentally gets shipped, which the legend tells will take him to the wild. With the help of a pigeon, Hamir, Samson and Benny go after him, sneaking into a garbage disposal truck with Nigel, Bridget, and Larry coming as well, accidentally throwing Benny off the truck. After passing through Times Square and nearly being crushed in the garbage disposal, the group encounters a pack of rabid stray dogs. Samson leads them through the sewer rather than scaring them off. There, they take directions to the docks from two street wise alligator brothers, Stan and Carmine.
At an unknown location, near a remote asylum, a group of young bald boys are receiving tattoos of bar codes on the back of their heads; men observe, direct, and coordinate the training of these young boys in firearms and hand-to-hand combat, as well as stamina and strength. In these scenes, it is shown that these young boys are trained from an early age to be professional, international hitmen-for-hire.
A nobleman Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) is falsely accused of an assassination attempt by his boyhood friend Messala (Toby Kebbell). He survives years of slavery under the Romans and attempts to get revenge.