Nice try, but too long and too disjointed

Rating: 6/10 (12 October 2012)

Not going to recap the plot, everyone else has done that. The first 2/3 was pretty absorbing, but finally it became apparent that the threads really weren't going to come together. I still don't know what the movie was trying to say beyond greeting-card platitudes such as "I believe when one door closes, another opens" and a vague sense of continuity between the eras reinforced by common actors and objects lasting through time.
I'll say this is the Wachowski's best movie since the first Matrix (not saying much) but more concrete ties between the stories would have improved coherence. For example, perhaps a Fabricant-Union rebellion triggered the cataclysm implied by the far future storyline. Other elements near the end seemed to come out of nowhere (like the signed contract for something and the box of gold) but maybe I lost track of something mentioned 2 1/2 hours before. And is Hugo Weaving getting tired of being typecast as the bad guy?
So overall, interesting most of the time and ambitious, but at the end like trying to pick up jello.