Too much in some ways

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2013)

I really enjoyed this movie because of the craftsmanship and intriguing story/characters. The performances and scenery are top notch. The directing and story telling were intricately and skillfully made. The story is rather tragic, so don't watch this one to be uplifted. The shortcomings of this movie are: 1) It is too intricate. The scenes are out of sequence jumping around from recent past to years past to present without any blatant cues as to the time period. It took me about ten minutes or so to get a feeling for the jumps. Once I got a feel for how they were indicating the time, I was able to lose myself in the movie, however, the others who were watching it with me had a hard time. If you are someone who has trouble with flashback, you probably will not enjoy this movie for this reason alone. Although, I think that they did a very good job in this aspect, it will probably alienate many viewers through confusion. 2) This is not really a scifi story, yet it has scifi which I think detracts from the story. They could have easily written it without any scifi at all and I think that it would have been a more satisfying and interesting story. Throwing in a little bit of scifi unexpectedly and using it as a significant plot device at the very end of the story ruined my suspension of disbelief. There are so many puzzle pieces to assemble regarding the characters' actions, motivations, and secrets that throwing this curve ball in at the end detracts from the effect that they had worked so hard to achieve. This movie is about characters and intrigue rather than fanciful technologies.