Nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Score
As inventive narratives go, there’s outside the box, and then there’s pioneering another dimensionentirely, and this collaboration among Tom Tykwer and Wachowski siblings Lana and Andy courageously attempts the latter, interlacing six seemingly unrelated stories in such a way that parallels erupt like cherry bombs in the imagination.
Based on David Mitchell’s novel, this adaptation rejects the book’s innovative but overly literary format in favour of a more cinematic approach, opting to tell all half-dozen tales at once. Like juggling Ginsu blades, the tricky feat is part stunt, part skill, but undeniably entertaining as half a millennium of world history unfolds, much of it set in centuries still to come.
Each of the stories involves some measure of romance, beginning in 1849, with American lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) separated from his beloved (Doona Bae) by seafaring adventures among the Pacific Islands, and extending to the year 2346, where a lowly goatherder (Tom Hanks) falls for an emissary (Halle Berry) from the opposite end of the technological spectrum in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Common themes echo throughout the film, where the gesture of liberating a slave in 1849 reverberates through time, culminating in a paradigm-changing insurrection whose denouement occurs two centuries later.
Peter Debruge, Variety
