Problems crop up almost immediately.
After sitting through ten minutes of ersatz documentary tripe that attempts to explain Anderson's fascination with seemingly random, yet interconnected bizarre tales of death and destruction, we get to spend the next hour meeting dozens of characters who inhabit various corners of the San Fernando Valley. No such luck. While the sheer quantity of plotting makes it nearly impossible to summarize anything, it is safe to say that just about everyone here's been alone and isolated for so long that a watershed of personal epiphanies is bound to happen. That they all happen on the same day is a coincidence that only happens when one man wields the pen that sketches dramatic structure. More proof that if you give a guy too much power, there's a fairly good chance some of it will go to his head.