Ridiculous

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 2017)

I normally love these kind of movies  the kind where you get some clues along the way that then come together and make sense at the end. I am very patient and enjoy the type of story that unfolds gradually – then at the end comes clarity and understanding. This was that kind of story  but without the clarity and understanding part at the end. Yeah, I get the whole branching decision tree parallel life thread thing. But that primary story line was surrounded with a TON of ridiculous imagery and scenes that seem to have been just randomly thrown in (and repeated) for no real reason at all. Then at the end Van Dormael just punted on putting any kind of real ending on it. If felt ripped off after initially taking this movie seriously, trying to comprehend and pull together all of these strange clues  only to find that these strange clues were mostly a mess of unresolved random crap.
Van Dormael also makes a weak attempt at weaving the butterfly-effect into the story. SPOILER ALERT. It is explained how a man in South America that missed work and boiled an egg caused it to rain half-way around the world and obliterate Anna's phone number. I could buy the first part of that  but why does this mean that Nemo has to hold out the phone number in the palms of his hands and helplessly watch it slowly get obliterated by the rain like an idiot? Wouldn't you take some extreme action to protect the single most valuable phone number of your life? Or maybe just some reasonable action like putting the phone number in your pocket and getting out of the rain? Obvious Van Dormael didn't think so. To Van Dormael it was more reasonable to have Nemo stand there and cry while he watches the number and the future with his true love get slowly destroyed by the rain! (All that didn't matter anyway since Anna was purposely trying to get away from him by giving him an invalid phone number (area code 123)).
On the other hand the acting and character development was excellent  with one huge exception  Nemo the old man. (Still in SPOILER ALERT mode here) Every scene with the old man was painful to watch. The incongruity between the young Nemos and the old man was ridiculous. The teen and adult Nemo were sensitive, loving, kind, nuanced characters while the old man was a stereotypical cranky, opinionated old man. Van Dormael couldn't do any better than that? It's like he Googled "Stupid Hollywood Stereotypical Characters" and picked "cranky old man" and thought that would work just fine in this movie.
I'll leave it at that. There's a lot more wrong with this movie but I think you get the picture.