Tries hard to be deep, but is actually paper-thin.

Rating: 2/10 (15 April 2019)

I get what they were trying to do. The basic premise and message of the film can be summarised roughly as, "If individuals don't stand up for what is right, even if the cause seems hopeless, then evil will prevail".
There were a few other similar messages mixed in. The attempt to tap in to the ongoing save-the-planet trend was never more obvious than in the "what is an ocean but a multitude of drops" line. A cute sentiment, but the sort of "wisdom" one might find in the "365 thoughts for your day" philosophy books you see on sale for £2 next to the till in bookshops. Hardly enough to transform 3 hours of mish-mashed short-stories (more like fables really, given their moralistic nature) into a masterpiece of intellectual art.
That these messages are, ultimately, truisms is probably why there are so many people falling over themselves to claim this as a masterpiece. Some people prefer to believe that it was, because the messages are positive ones that most can agree with. The jumble of the film itself then becomes beneficial, as people who are emotionally swayed by the message will attack critics of the film (who they misconstrue as critics of the message perhaps?) and leap to its defence with overenthusiastic praise, and outlandish claims of deep meaning where there is none. A 10/10 movie this is NOT.
The film-making itself was bad on so many levels. Trite dialogue, no story arc, no sense of resolution, no character development. Add to that the lack of overall coherence and the downright weird accent choices, and it rendered even Tom Hanks unable to deliver a performance worth watching. I engaged with none of his characters, particularly the more badly-made-up and voiced ones.
The individual stories were basically totally disparate sketches of people variously displaying heroism in the face of adversity, with the historic, present and future settings intending to show that we, here now, are the potential heroes of tomorrow. But not one single story managed to engage me, and I found myself irritated by the pretence that 3 hours was needed to adequately get that rather basic message across. It ended up feeling like a lecture, rather than entertainment.
I am never particularly keen on "spiritualism dressed as science", and this film does hit that nerve in places. The line "My uncle was a scientist, but he believed that love was real...that it lasts forever" is a particularly egregious example of it. It's usually used by screenwriters to lend whatever pseudo-philosophy plot-device they are selling a veneer of intellectual respectability. In better films I am always willing to suspend my disbelieving irritation. Here I was not.
There are plenty of people out there who love all that sort of thing though, and it is no doubt they who are awarding the high marks for the film!
The equally problematic notion of multiple lives was also totally unnecessary and irrelevant to the message, but seems to me to have been done here purely to maximise the use of their big-name cast-members.
To say they don't dwell on this element of the story would be incorrect. They don't dwell on anything. "Shallow" is all that is on offer here on any topic they raise.
Apparently this film was from a book. Perhaps it should have stayed that way. I'm not sure I'd even be bothered reading the book now, based on this re-telling.