An attempt to make a complicated master piece that failed

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2012)

I went to watch this movie with high expectations, and I didn't get what I wanted completely. So I'll explain you what not to expect in this movie, so you enjoy watching it thoroughly. After watching the trailer, I always asked my self how can such a movie suffer from not-so-good box office results? Well, after watching the movie itself, I got my answer. It now seems reasonable to me why this movie didn't sell that good: It tries to be a complicated masterpiece, but it fails to do so. I will first explain the good part then I'll get into what the movie fails at.
The movie switches between 6 different story-lines in different times and even different genres of film-making! with characters having connections to characters in other story-lines. With same actors changing makeup and play different roles in different timelines. This is to give you an Inception-like feeling of connection between characters of different stories, possibly through reincarnation. This kind of movie making certainly pushed the directors and makeup artist and virtually everyone in the crew to their limits, to put all of their talent on the table. And frankly, with a few exceptions, they do a magnificent job.
The movie tries to bring a complicated plot; One that you could view over and over again and with each viewing, you get new things out of it. But it fails to do so. The connections between the characters are few and simple, with almost none of them having any influence in the game. Basically the movie is 6 stories apart from each other, glued to each other to make one movie to make you feel they're related. They also mention exciting concepts like 'dejavu', 'time-space continuum', 'quantum physics' and 'Heisenberg uncertainty' here and there, but the concepts are only mentioned briefly often in a wrong way and actually have nothing to do with the movie! It's like they were not smart enough to put them in plot so just mentioned them on the pass so the audience feels there is something complicated going on there, while there is not! The actors playing multiple roles is a nice idea but unlike Inception, there is usually no reason behind it! But it's nice to see actors playing different roles in so diverse universes in one movie, and they do their job well, except a few casts are ridiculous (The Asian actor playing a blonde blue-eyed French girl and Hugo Weaving (agent Smith in the Matrix) playing the hollow in the post-apocalyptic timeline).
All in all this is one of those movies that tries to look smart by putting a lot of open questions and unexplained connections to make the viewer wonder, and make a bold undertaking by mixing 6 timelines, but it ends up not doing its homework well.