Anyway, after a few days, I've been thinking about the movie a lot and trying to piece together what I'm left with after watching (and, I should say, being entertained by) the whole thing. When all is said and done, I've come away with an appreciation for what Tykwer and the Wachowskis were trying to do, telling a huge, sprawling epic with emotionally resonant stories, but it’s also incredibly apparent how they could have made it much tighter and better.
The overall theme of the film seems to be that our actions have effects -- sometimes far-reaching effects -- beyond our own existence. Like Sonmi says, "Our lives are not our own." We're responsible for not only what we do with our lives, but what those lives will ultimately do to others' lives. It's almost enough to make you not want to do much of anything, for fear of causing hardship for those around and future generations, but if you can get past that, the idea gives you an awareness of your place in the tapestry of the world.
We're presented with versions of the same people in six different epochs, from the 1800s to the 2200s. Their personalities and circumstances change every time, and there's always some sort of connection between one epoch and the next... someone reads a book or hears music written by one of the other epoch's characters, or visits the same place. And here's the first instance in which I think the storytellers missed an opportunity. Sometimes the connection between one epoch and the next is really tenuous, and the influence characters have on each other isn't really clear. Take Jim Broadbent's modern-day publisher, for example. You can fleetingly see him reading the book written by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry in an earlier epoch) while he's on the train, but never mentions it. Whether her story of uncovering a nuclear power lobbying conspiracy inspires him to break out of the nursing home/asylum he's forcibly placed in is not clear. I think the movie would have been much stronger if there had been a clear line where one character's overcoming of adversity had clearly affected another. Even a further explanation of "The Fall", some kind of man-made apocalypse which apparently led from a futuristic society to a broken-down wilderness, would have helped.
There's also the issue of what these characters are fighting against. It's usually a human rights issue of one sort or another, and stories separated by 400 years end with blows being struck against human slavery. If the movie’s central theme is the progression of the human race, one has to wonder how far we have come if we're struggling with the same issues over and over again.
That idea of improvement over time is a missed boat with the individual characters, too. I understand that it's a neat selling point (both to actor and to audience) to have movie stars playing up to six vastly different characters – e.g. Halle Berry as elderly male Korean cyborg doctor! -- but it doesn't seem to have any real value in the story itself. For a while, I thought that maybe Tom Hanks' character was really the same soul, making better decisions as he came back time and again. He did go from a corrupt doctor who would slowly poison a man for his gold to a selfless peasant of the future who risks his life for a stranger in need. But then I remembered that in the modern-day epoch (chronologically the fourth out of the six stories), he was a disgruntled Cockney author who, in cold blood, killed a man who gave him a bad review. How much richer would the story be if you could see him improving from life to life instead?
Now, keep in mind that reincarnation isn't something that I brought to the table myself. The recurring characters all have an identical shooting-star birthmark on their bodies somewhere. And at one point, Hanks and Berry actually talk pointblank about how they get the feeling that they keep meeting over and over again in different lives. But after all that, I'm not sure what the birthmarks are supposed to represent. Are these people marked in this way to represent the unique way they are linked? Because if that's the case, it's blunting the movie's message about how we *all* are linked and *all* are responsible for those around us. Or maybe the birthmark means that these are special people, destined for this cycle of lives in a way that the rest of us aren't. That muddles the idea even more.
I'm ignoring the fact here that it's also kind of distracting to play find-the-star in each of the epochs, especially with extensive make-up jobs that often change the race of the actor. Admittedly, there were more than a few that I missed, which I learned from watching the recap that precedes the end credits. Like I said, it would have meant more if there had been a reason for it, but clearly a fair number of these "links" were background cameos and weren't even necessary. Wouldn't it have been a better, more cohesive story if they had been, if we could have seen relationships and situations evolve across centuries? Is it really worth the credibility lost when Hugo Weaving plays a Nurse Ratched-like Englishwoman? Or when Jim Sturgess tries to pass as Asian in a room full of actual Asian actors?
Like I've said, I appreciate what the filmmakers were trying to do, and maybe going back to the source novel would help in explaining what all these stories really have to do with each other. But what I see is six stories that don't have a lot to say in and of themselves, loosely woven together into an ambitious film that appears to be deeper and more important than it really is.
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