In 1821, Don Diego De La Vega (Anthony Hopkins) fights against the Spanish in the Mexican War of Independence as Zorro, a mysterious swordsman who defends the Mexican peasants and commoners of Las Californias. Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson), the governor of the region, learns of De La Vega's alter ego, and attempts to arrest him. De La Vega's wife is killed during the scuffle. Montero imprisons De La Vega and takes his infant daughter, Eléna, as his own. Twenty years later Montero returns to California as a civilian, alongside Eléna (Catherine Zeta Jones), who has grown into a beautiful woman. Montero's reappearance coincides with De La Vega's escape from prison. He encounters a thief, Alejandro Murrieta (Antonio Banderas), who, as a child, once did Zorro a favor. De La Vega decides that fate has brought them together, and agrees to make Alejandro his protégé, grooming him to be the new Zorro. Murrieta agrees to undergo De La Vega's training regimen in order to be able to take revenge on Captain Harrison Love (Matt Letscher), Montero's right-hand man, who was responsible for killing Murrieta's brother, Joaquin.
The film follows the adventures of a group of friends through the eyes of Charles (Hugh Grant), a good-natured but socially awkward Briton, who is smitten with Carrie (Andie MacDowell), an American whom Charles repeatedly meets at four weddings and at a funeral.
Alice (Milla Jovovich) and the others on the Umbrella Corporation freighter Arcadia face an attack by a fleet of tiltrotors led by Alice's former ally, Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), who is being mind controlled by Umbrella through a scarab device attached to her chest. Alice causes a tiltrotor to crash into Arcadia, resulting in an explosion that knocks her out and into the water. The fates of Chris Redfield, Claire Redfield and K-Mart are ambiguous.
Sans famille, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) a été trouvée, enfant, dans une rivière. Elle porte au cou des cicatrices semblant témoigner de violences exercées sur son larynx, qui expliqueraient qu'elle soit muette. Elle vit dans une grande solitude, tout comme son voisin de palier Giles (Richard Jenkins), un vieil homosexuel, illustrateur publicitaire sans emploi.
In 1850 (nine years after the events of the first film), California is voting on whether to join the United States of America as a state. A wild gunman with wooden teeth, Jacob McGivens, attempts to steal some ballots, but Zorro chases after him and recaptures the votes. In their scuffle, McGivens pulls off Zorro's mask. A pair of Pinkerton agents recognize him as Don Alejandro de la Vega. Zorro fashions a makeshift mask from his costume and rides off on his stallion, Tornado, to deliver the votes to the governor. Upon returning to his mansion, Alejandro is greeted by his loving wife, Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Elena believes that Alejandro can now up give his alter ego, but Alejandro is sure that the people will still need him. The next day, after sending their son Joaquin to school, Elena is confronted by the Pinkertons, who disclose their knowledge of Zorro's identity. Soon after, Elena is forced to have Alejandro served with divorce papers.
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.
Kate and John Coleman (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) are experiencing strains in their marriage after their third child was stillborn. The loss is particularly hard on Kate, who is also recovering from alcoholism. The couple decides to adopt a 9-year-old Russian girl, Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from a local orphanage. While Kate's and John's deaf daughter Max (Aryana Engineer) embraces Esther immediately, their son Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) is less welcoming. Kate suspects that there might be problems in Esther's background when Esther's knowledge of sex extends beyond her age. Her suspicions deepen when Esther seriously injures another girl who had bullied her.
In the Bélier family, sixteen-year-old Paula is an indispensable interpreter for her deaf parents and brother on a daily basis, especially in the running of the family farm. One day, a music teacher discovers her gift for singing and encourages Paula to participate in a prestigious singing contest in Paris, which will secure her a good career and a college degree. However, this decision would mean leaving her family and taking her first steps towards adulthood.
A mute Scotswoman named Ada McGrath is sold by her father into marriage to a New Zealand frontiersman named Alisdair Stewart, bringing her young daughter Flora with her. The voice that the audience hears in the opening narration is "not her speaking voice, but her mind's voice". Ada has not spoken a word since she was six years old and no one, including herself, knows why. She expresses herself through her piano playing and through sign language, for which her daughter has served as the interpreter. Flora later dramatically tells two women in New Zealand that her mother has not spoken since the death of her husband who died as a result of being struck by lightning. Ada cares little for the mundane world, occupying herself for hours every day with the piano. Flora, it is later learned, is the product of a relationship with a teacher with whom Ada believed she could communicate through her mind, but who "became frightened and stopped listening," and thus left her.
Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) is a troubled young deaf woman working as a cleaner at a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in New England. An energetic new teacher, James Leeds (William Hurt), arrives at the school and encourages her to set aside her insular life by learning how to speak aloud.
The story begins on a fine summer's morning, when Sang-woo (Yoo Seung-ho) and his mother board a bus to the country. It is soon clear that the unsophisticated rural passengers annoy the seven-year-old urban boy. His mother is taking him to live with his 75-year-old mute, but not deaf, grandmother (Kim Eul-boon) while she looks for a new job after a business venture failed in Seoul. Eventually they reach their destination, a dusty bus stop in the Korean countryside near an unsophisticated village.
The film is set partially in the business offices and partially in the underworld of Paris. Carla, a lonely woman burdened by lack of respect from her co-workers and her only friend, Annie, begins to change after a younger man enters her life.
Set in an indeterminate year of the 1840s, the film opens in a villa in Madrid, Spain, where Don Diego Vega (George Hamilton), the archetypal Spanish Don Juan, is in bed with a beautiful woman who, we learn shortly, is not his wife, but someone else's. The couple are caught by her husband, Garcia, who "is not in Barcelona", as they had previously thought. Diego, with considerable panache, fights Garcia and his five brothers with swords. During the fight, Diego's mute servant Paco (Donovan Scott) reads a letter (via gestures) from Diego's father requesting that Diego return to California [then a part of Mexico]. Diego and Paco escape by jumping from a high wall directly into a waiting carriage.
In Lagrange, Ohio, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) has apocalyptic dreams, and visual and auditory hallucinations, of rain "like motor oil", swarms of menacing black birds, and being harmed by people close to him; but, he hides all of this from his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and their deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). He instead channels his anxieties into a compulsive obsession to build a storm shelter in his backyard; however, his increasingly strange behavior -- including a tendency to cut ties with anyone in his life that has harmed him only in his dreams -- strains his relationship with his family, friends, employer, and the close-knit town. Curtis grudgingly sees a counselor at a free clinic, with whom he talks about his family's psychological history (his mother (Kathy Baker) suffers from paranoid schizophrenia that surfaced in her at about the same age that Curtis is now).
Murphy "Barfi" Johnson (Ranbir Kapoor) is an optimistic, street-wise, charming young man who was born deaf-mute to a Nepali couple in Darjeeling. His mother died when he was a baby and his father raised him alone, while working as a chauffeur. Barfi is known as a troublemaker – he cuts lampposts, plays practical jokes on innocent people, and is chased by Sudhanshu Dutta (Saurabh Shukla), a local police officer. Barfi meets Shruti Ghosh (Ileana D'Cruz), who has just arrived in Darjeeling; she is engaged to Ranjit Sengupta (Jisshu Sengupta), and is due to get married in three months, and Barfi is immediately smitten with Shruti. She also falls in love with Barfi but her mother dissuades her from pursuing him because he could not take care of her with his disabilities and lack of money. Shruti takes her mother's advice, gets married, and moves to Kolkata, breaking all contact with Barfi.