Don't waste your time!

Rating: 1/10 (7 July 2007)

Before I go any further I'd just like to say that my wife & I only watched this film after reading the glowing (and in some cases awe-filled) user reviews here on IMDb. We won't be making that mistake again! Frankly, anybody that was 'blown-away' by the 'deep spiritual message' contained in this film must have ; a) never picked up a book on spirituality before, or b) really enjoy hard to follow, slow paced films that are virtually devoid of anything approaching a decent storyline.
We had the feeling after about 30 minutes of dark, drearily slow & frankly boring screen time that this could possibly be a waste of time, but nothing prepared us for the realisation that we had just wasted a good Saturday evening on a 'message' that could have been said in one sentence, and delivered with more flair and imagination than this.
Basically is 3 story lines running at once. The first is a very shabby, badly lit and constantly repetitive yarn about a Spanish queen and one of her employees on the hunt for the tree of life. The second, and only vaguely interesting one, is about a medical researcher / surgeon, (your guess is as good as mine as nothing is explained properly in this film), who is trying to save his dying wife by finding a cure for her brain (again just guessing here) tumor. The last is basically hugh jackman floating around space in a bubble and hugging a tree.
The latter is the most annoying aspect of this film as it neither says nor provokes anything at all. Of course not forgetting the underlying trait of this film not explaining who, when, how or why he is in this bubble in the first place. I've read other reviews here that go on about him being a 25th century astronaut grieving for his dead wife.... where exactly is that mentioned in the film? Overall a dull, uninspiring dumbing down of the age old theory of everlasting life.
Hugh Jackman puts on a great show, as always, and it's made even better by the fact that he had so little to work with.
Where this film does excel is in it's total disregard for anything deep and spiritual. If this was to taken as written we all basically end up in the ground and there is no need to worry about any sort of spiritual progression or higher learning.
If you have any interest in the afterlife or spirituality don't waste your time with this.. You'll walk away confused - not due to the lack of any plot or explanation - but because your head will spin wondering how a film with virtually no real content ever got a green light.