Inevitable after reading the source book. Adapted by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Lilly Wachowski with some help from Chris Lindsay. IMDB trivia suggests author David Mitchell had some input too.
The movie makes it clearer how derivative the whole enterprise is, though I grant I wasn't invested enough to trainspot all the links between the stories. There's a lot of deviation from and bowdlerisation of the book which perhaps makes it make more (explicit) sense. Hugo Weaving got all the bit parts that glued the show together, none requiring him to get out of first gear (or even into gear really). It is complex and lengthy but fatally the characters are too shallowly drawn. The necessary Hollywood romance is added, as are some scenes that are visual feasts but do not further things. The sliced-up storytelling made it very difficult to engage with Halle Berry's 1970s paranoid thriller. Emotionally vapid. Philosophically bunk. Bae Doona, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant (in old greaser mode) and even Tom Hanks obviously had some fun.
Roger Ebert: four unfathomable stars. He was overwhelmed. Dana Stevens: "Where the book is sinuous and oblique, [this] film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility." "Throughout the movie, the directors’ dark vision of history as a ruthless march toward the abattoir coexists uneasily with their romanticization of individual acts of heroism." And so on.
