Contrived in every possible way

Rating: 1/10 (17 September 2013)

So the book is already kind of hokey and, to quote my friend, "contrived." He was not at all enjoying the slog until he got to the part with the Replicants, and the futuristic world of Neo-Seoul. He thought it would be cool to see that in a movie so..here I am, letting you know not to waste 3 hours.
There is a way to connect themes and story lines into a coherent whole, and to make a point without being maudlin or blatant about it, and most importantly, without sacrificing cinematic entertainment value. This film fails at all that. Also, Tom Hanks is downright embarrassing to watch half the time.
The primary fault lies in the Wachowski script, which seems to have the attention span and the fixations of a media-addicted and intellectually-arrogant nine year old. I would wager that sometime in the last half a century or so, human beings lost an objectively- measurable amount of patience, and measuring the average time between camera cuts and scene changes in each major Hollywood production across the decades will show a steady decrease in the average. Like a catatonic remote clicker with only six channels to choose from, the film switches between its six narratives at an irritatingly rapid rate, never letting any of them breathe or be elaborated upon. The movie is almost three hours long, and I doubt there's a scene longer than five minutes in the entire thing. This may not be all that important in the slave-era narrative, which involves basic motives, requires little setup, and is mostly confined to a ship. But the world of Neo-Seoul is rich with great cinematic opportunity and plot detail, largely missed or discarded in favor of sleek and expensive CGI action sequences (presumably by the script-writers themselves, although one can only guess at the real number of human brains involved in polishing a script these days).
Clearly, the script itself has no patience for the atmosphere, leaving that job to the set designers, the CGI wizards, and Tykwer, who does his best to imbue this turgid wreck with some flair and confidence, and even manages to get some decent performances out of the other cast. (And sure, if I was watching Tom Hanks on screen at any point and didn't realize it, I would consider that a job well done for Tykwer.) So what does the film care about?
Well, for one, it's way into the Grand Theme of the novel, which is basically that the same story of actions and consequences is told over and over throughout time in different ways, and that Everything Is Connected. The deepest it ever gets is hinting at shared memory, karmic forces, and the endless historical cycle of stagnation and renewal, but because of the rapid pace, this is gloss at best. For the most part, endless voice-over passages are devoted to telling us that, yes, interconnectedness is precisely what's happening here, and whenever possible, the stories intercut between what amounts to the same thing happening in all of them (there's a Capture, here's a Capture - there's a Friendly Hand, here's a Friendly Hand!). If that doesn't sound kind of contrived to you, especially if I tell you how neatly it's all wrapped up and presented, then you will probably be into this.
Have I mentioned how contrived this was yet? Like, that all the main characters have these special comet-shaped birthmarks? "That mark...I've seen it before somewhere.." Paraphrasing actual dialogue there. Or the incessant meta-by-the-numbers moments when a character says "someone should write a book about this" or some variation thereof? Or that one of the (longer) scenes involves a futuristic escape with a narrow foldout drawbridge precariously slung over the depths of Neo Seoul with a harpoon, host to a high-wire gun-fu ballet as it is slowly being torn to shreds by large-caliber machine gun fire from attack aircraft? That's not in the book, by the way (on the other hand, you would have gotten mutants!), and neither are most of the other action scenes - a notable exception is an endearing moment when a retirement home employee gets his tooth knocked out into a beer at a Scottish pub brawl.
Is it a mere necessity - a consideration for the average moviegoer's attention span and general inability to follow complex, multiple threads without constant reinforcement? Or is such an already-contrived and over-hyped book a magnet begging for egoed hacks like the Wachowskis to make it worse? In any case, the best part was when the cat clawed the naked guy's crotch and he fell out of a window. And despite certain obvious sci-fi gimmicks, the fast food joints of Neo Seoul with their brightly-colored 3d-printed food and Soap-eating Replicant clones in revealing uniforms were neat, kind of like stopping at a Froyo franchise in the Fifth Element...