A Horrifically Convoluted Film

Rating: 1/10 (20 December 2013)

It is never a good sign when you get eighty minutes into a film and genuinely sigh when you realise that is just the halfway point. I forced myself to carry on but it just doesn't get better. The stories don't build up to anything and don't go anywhere. There is scarcely any underlying plot. What few 'revelations' there are were obvious all along and usually just nicked right out of better stories. I can only assume the 'Soylent Green' line in the nursing home plot was put in as a joke when they realised the entire plot of the future story was just a rip off of it.
The biggest problem? The cast. Even in regular films where each actor plays just one role I often have a hard time telling faces apart. If the two lead male roles look remotely alike for instance I will sometimes not be sure who is the good guy and who is the bad guy between scenes.
This film is nightmarish for me. Every actor plays a half dozen roles employing a large array of absolutely absurd looking make up and incomprehensible accents. I feel I'd have grasped the point of the film far better if I could have understood even half of what the future tribe people were on about. The combination of a deep south accent, dyslexic speech patterns and made up words rendered the vast majority of it entirely pointless. Firefly did good futuristic style rural slang... it painted a beautiful picture of society whilst the meaning was still generally clear. This film might as well just be in bloody German.
As best as I could tell in this convoluted mess... the notion is that all the characters have lived past and future lives and that these are all somehow interconnected. This however does not explain why Hugo Weaving goes from being an old man to an unconvincing woman to a green demon man to some kind of giant bipedal fish. Honestly the make up and prosthetics employed to try and make him look vaguely Asian are just plain offensive. It's not even clear why he was in that particular role... all it did was make the scene ridiculous. Likewise with the future character of the lawyer/pianist. He ends up looking more like a vampire from Buffy than an Asian man.
The result is that the vast majority of the characters don't even look human. Virtually every scene has someone made up to look old and it never looks convincing. I'm fairly sure one of the characters changes from a black woman to a white woman too. Any serious plot is utterly lost behind these comic book like facades. Honestly would have been more engaging if the characters were just giant bipedal fish men...
I'm sure at least half the roles Tom Hanks appears in throughout this film serve absolutely no function either. The plot would not have been affected by casting an extra in the role instead. As a result whatever interconnectedness the plot is trying to get towards gets lost by characters which just don't need to be in the film.
Ultimately this is just a few very short stories without enough backbone to stand up on their own so they decided to weave them all together under a web of absolute nonsense. Absolute nonsense in which Hugo Weaving has a tendency to look like a fish monster.
Save the two and a half hours of your time. Get one of those kid's activity books with the mazes in it instead. That's a far less tangled mess.