This movie demands your complete attention

Rating: 3/10 (14 June 2013)

Three hours of my life, which I'll never get back.
This movie, which attempts to be a sprawling epic, demands your rapt attention at all times, if you hope to have the faintest clue as to what's going on. It casually jumps from story to story, and depends heavily on the character's narrations, whose shallow philosophical monologues apply to multiple time periods (in case you weren't confused enough). Those same monologues may at any time be other characters reading stories from the past. I wish I could say that the filmmakers managed to generate empathy at any point during the film, but I could not find myself giving any love to these flat and uninteresting characters. The pace flips between molasses slow and murder spree, with little to no buildup of tension.
Even people who gave this a high review admit there were times in the movie they felt completely lost. It's not you, guys. It's the movie. There's no centering narrative in this careless jumble of unbelievable accents and even less believable makeup. It drags on and on, and I found myself torn between wanting to know how the various threads ended and just wanting the movie to be over. I'm sure the book flows better, making the connections between these stories more obvious, but the movie does a terrible job of juggling six narratives. Add to that these thick, annoyingly fake accents and "creative" grammar, and you have a recipe for frequent cases of "What the hell did he just say?" That's not going to win you any points in a story that's hard enough to follow already.
Many of the reviews here remind me as a cluster of art critics huddling around an uninspired work of modern art, yammering on and on about how a set of colored rectangles holds such deep emotional implications. Maybe they're right, and I'm just not seeing the feeling of the rectangles, but I found this movie to be painfully dull and pretentious.