Bright, uplifting, family fun!

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2013)

Oh wait, that was Lorax. After reading the first dozen user reviews searching for someone who reads this film's thesis as I do, I am quitting that quest and putting fingers to keys.
The film's unique convention is to employ seven key actors portraying several lives they have lived/are living/will live across centuries, into the future. Reincarnation, not simply, "Tom Hanks plays several characters."
The arc of each life is therefore much more expansive than in traditional storytelling, and the rules in force tell us that actions in past lives carry forward and must be reconciled in some future life, for a life to be content.
The non-linear inter-cutting of multiple situations and arcs starts in the first minute and challenges the viewer to connect dots until a unifying thesis emerges - that institutionalized oppression is evil and overwhelming, yes, and must be challenged by individuals, no matter how long the odds seem to be against the individual.
There are countless stories across time that tell of a hero's quest to take action to defeat evil and restore balance. Quite unlike most of them, this film has a wildly expansive and elaborately ornate unfolding. It is, in singular moments, very funny, very shocking, wonderfully swashbuckling, downright spacey, and magical/mythical. On the flip side, the main storyline with Halle Berry's impossible to understand futuristic traveler character is full of sketchy material that raises more questions than the film answers, and none of it is important (who put that mountain on earth - the one that can be converted to a huge satellite dish with a blue laser beacon at the touch of a button, and for that matter, WTF was she doing on Earth anyway? She flew in on what looked like a pretty slick, perfectly functional spacecraft?) All this detracts and confuses, and in a three hour movie, it's just too much sht squeezed into one sack.
Others call this a masterpiece. Well, certainly the production quality is sky high in every regard, and that is where a large portion of the audience form their impressions.
My takeaway: this is a very creative, very well made, very challenging to follow and hugely indulgent vehicle for the author(s) to make their point.
One odd detail: most people die of head trauma. If there is a significance that makes this vital to the thesis, it remains obscure to me in hindsight.