Weak, incongruent, often pointless

Rating: 3/10 (12 January 2009)

The "Benjamin Button" has a certain pretense which you realize after an analysis. It is slow, contemplative, with numerous promising setups and sub-plots. You attempt to grasp symbolism, hypothesize what could a "great new ideas" be derived from here. You think of cinematic experience, special effects, montage, mise-en-scène. You wait anticipating all of this tie up at some point and create a catharsis. Finally, it ends, and you are left with nothing. All the stories, scenes, episodes  everything is left unresolved, childishly trivial, superficial and weak. No ideas, no character development, no thought. Many story lines, such as daughter, learning of her real father's precarious condition, her mother, dying of cancer, the hospital scenes in the onset of Katrina in New Orleans (?). What's missing is 9-11, Afghanistan and Iraq wars and election of Obama. I started from detail analysis of all sub-plots, but had to give up finding this exercise utterly exhausting.
This is pretentious small 'moving pictures' which only be remembered for the utter inaptness of directorial and screen writer's work.