An exercise in pointlessness

Rating: 5/10 (16 October 2011)

Take several helpings of philosophical and physics theories and blend these together with some artsy cinematography and sci-fi backdrops to make it appear philosophical and "highly intellectual" as some reviews have described it. But if any of these were the goal of the makers of this movie, they failed miserably.
The director and the writer use confusion, chaos and distraction to make this movie appear highly cerebral. However it is a set of dissonant scenes forcefully held together without an underlying unifying idea pretending to be philosophical but offering no ideas, answers or even questions. It is as if someone had the philosophy alphabet cereal for breakfast in the morning and then vomited on a movie script at Noon. The ideas are all over the place, half digested and full of bile. Some people may confuse this for intellectualism but it is nothing more than half-baked flashes of thought. It is the cacophony of ideas that makes the movie appear philosophical, but only in a way similar to how a carnival magician shows a coin and then makes it disappear, leaving you thinking about how he pulled it off and not about the coin itself.
The unnecessarily stretched plot runs into over two hours without really needing to. One could easily cut out many of the scenes without losing much of the meaning of this movie, because there is not much meaning to lose. In fact, one could completely skip the movie and not miss much.