This is an ambitious one. I feel like I’d have hated it in the cinema but did actually quite enjoy it at home.
In David Mitchell’s novel, which I remember really enjoying, the parallel stories are told in a pyramid-fashion: you start with the oldest, moving forwards in time and then it all cascades backwards again, until you finish up with the end of the oldest story. Someone decided (probably correctly) that this would feel a bit weird in film - too much like an anthology of separate stories - and instead has jumbled the stories all together. We cut from colonial-era shipping to future revolutions in New Seoul and back again. It’s a little disorientating but if you sit back and let it was over you its quite fun. The recurring cast, popping up again and again with face-altering prosthetics is great fun.
This was the Wachowskis’ next major project after the Matrix sequels and writing the screenplay for V for Vendetta, so I can sort of imagine how this felt a bit flat. It’s epic in scale but never really quite goes anywhere. I suspect this is something that a book handles much better - the sense that the journey was more important than the destination - but at the end of 3 hours of film you’re sort of left wondering what the point of it all was.
So yeah, ambitious, quite good fun, lots of silly costumes. Not bad.