“To make God laugh, tell him your plans,” spits a young widow late in “Amores Perros,” the splashy, moving debut that put Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu on the map in 2000. She has learned the lesson everyone learns in Mr. Iñárritu’s films: Misfortune prefers to ambush.

And it doesn’t seem particularly concerned about collateral damage, either. The violent accidents around which all three of Mr. Iñárritu’s films are structured — in his first two, car crashes; in his latest, “Babel,” a shooting mishap in North Africa involving an American tourist — invariably claim multiple victims, including the audience, which must bear witness to emotional fallout that is at times so excruciating that watching it becomes a near-traumatic experience all its own.

Mr. Iñárritu’s films examine the shockwaves of disaster in almost prurient detail, but also impatiently, as if the director had attention deficit disorder. Starting from a brief, baleful moment of intersection, the narrative invariably shuttles between characters, tracing their separate trajectories one segment at a time. This whistle-stop approach to storytelling may allow viewers (in many cases, to their great relief) to duck out of difficult scenes; but ultimately, once the characters’ colliding courses have been fully charted, a seamless, spellbinding portrait of humanity materializes.

In “Babel,” as in “Amores Perros” and even in Mr. Iñárritu’s less convincing 2003 film “21 Grams,” the impact of that compound experience is not soon forgotten.

“Babel” may not be the best of Mr. Iñárritu’s three efforts, but it is the most ambitious. This time he and his usual collaborator, the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, have spread their grid paper over the entire planet. One of the three interconnected stories in “Babel” is a full-on emergency situation in a remote corner of Morocco; the other two unfold with less heated suspense just south of the American border and in Tokyo. As its title suggests, “Babel” depicts a diverse, multilingual cross-section of people who seem to have found infinite ways to misunderstand each other. But language in “Babel” is less of a barrier than old-fashioned prejudice and national borders, both of which remain stubbornly present in what is commonly described as a “global” era.

As Mexicans in the film resort to desperate measures to enter America, Moroccan shepherds remain strangers to the world beyond their backyard; but the filmmakers think nothing of cutting from those environs, where a vacationing American (Cate Blanchett) lies bleeding to death after a stray bullet pierces the window of her tour bus, to a scene in Tokyo, where a girls’ volleyball match is taking place. In the blink of an eye, panicked screams give way to a sporting event that is eerily silent: The athletes are deaf-mutes, and the spectators applaud by simply waving their hands. The star player, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), gets ejected for flipping off the umpire after a bad call. Afterward, her teammates tease her for losing her temper, but deep down she is stewing for different reasons, namely her mother’s recent death and the ostracization she suffers for her handicap.

Later that day, Chieko is channel-surfing in her living room when she sees a news flash: An American woman has been shot in Morocco; the suspects include the same two young goatherds who were shown earlier recklessly testing the range of their new rifle. Chieko loses interest in the TV when her best friend calls, popping up on the screen of her video cell phone. Meanwhile, the husband of the wounded American (Brad Pitt) is furiously dialing the American Embassy from the only phone in the Moroccan village. The shooting incident is all over the news, an official informs him. By some perverse political logic, this is precisely the reason they can’t evacuate his wife just this moment.

Eight time zones away in San Diego, the couple’s nanny (Adriana Barraza), through no fault of her own, is stuck with their son and daughter on the day of her son’s wedding. She and her nephew (Gael García Bernal) whisk the children off to Baja; all is going well until they hit the border station on the way back, where his cavalier behavior gets them in serious trouble.

Mr. Arriaga’s script, it must be said, is shamelessly overheated: Does Chieko need to be motherless? Must the American couple, on top of all their other problems, have already lost a child? And putting a minor in mortal danger every five minutes feels manipulative, if not exploitative. On the other hand, all three stories were shot on location, using superbly cast actors, and the filmmakers’ devotion to visual detail lends the images a startling authenticity that the artful strokes of Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography does nothing to diminish.

Which is to say, the profound chasm between the West and its less privileged neighbors is on full display. An American military helicopter arrives in the Moroccan hinterland like a deus ex machina, the blast of its rotor blades forcing villagers to shield their eyes and take cover. The scene is vividly suggestive as it is; the subsequent shot of the chopper briskly bypassing Casablanca’s enormous mosque offers, in a split second, a pregnant image of the forces that govern the world today.

But “Babel” grapples passionately with a timeless question, too. As three crises unspool simultaneously at different ends of the earth, no clear verdict is issued on who or what is to blame for any of them. Human folly plays a prominent role. But it doesn’t upstage the shadowy, ineffable forces that have always haunted man’s imagination, albeit by ever-changing names: the stars, God, the Matrix, and who knows what next.

Mr. Iñárritu is right to assume he need not sort all this out for us. He fails to fully integrate the three stories here (the Tokyo thread stays loose to the end), but he may be forgiven for that. The creator (intelligent designer?) of a bold film like this must above all embrace the whole thing completely — and that he has done. Every frame in “Babel” is filled with feeling.