Did not live up to my expectations.

Rating: 4/10 (17 February 2014)

I went into to this movie really wanting to like it. I generally like movies that deal with philosophy and spirituality. Ultimately, though, when I was through watching it, I felt very disappointed. This movie seemed to promise a lot. It seemed to promise some profundity. As far as I can see, though, this movie's entire premise can be summed up in one word: karma. The movie is telling us that what goes around comes around. That's all well and good, but the theme of karma does not require such a pretentious presentation. It's not as if it is some profound revelation. Many people are familiar with this concept. Perhaps there is more to this movie than just that. But if there is, it went over my head. The other main problem that I had with this movie is the way the stories unfolded. The movie told six independent stories of different genres. That sounds pretty cool, but they weren't told sequentially, they were all inter-spliced with each other. In other words, only ten minutes of one story would be told before moving on to ten minutes of the next story and on and on until it eventually cycled back to another ten minutes of the original story. That sounds like an interesting and unconventional form of filmmaking. The problem with that is I spent so little time with each story that I didn't have a chance to get invested in any of them. The movie never builds any momentum. I never got a chance to care about any of the characters. It's like flipping through six different movies on TV and trying to follow all of them. It doesn't help that none of these stories are very interesting to begin with. I guess editing the movie this way is supposed to imply that all of these stories are intertwined. It doesn't. The film is a success in terms of cinematography and acting, but it is a failure in terms of storytelling. I have to give credit to the directors for trying an experimental form of filmmaking. Sadly this is an experiment that failed.