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•In 1849, a young American lawyer (Sturgess) makes a journey to a Pacific island where slavery still holds sway and where he falls foul of a scheming doctor.
•In 1956, a young English gay composer (Whishaw) is hired as an amanuensis to a tyrannical older composer (Broadbent).
•In 1973, a journalist (Berry) puts her life in danger when she gets a whiff of a scandal involving nuclear power.
•In 2010, a pompous, unscrupulous publisher (Broadbent) is imprisoned in a retirement home by his brother.
•In an Asian city in 2014 a fabricant (Doona Bae), cloned to work in the food industry, discovers consciousness and falls in love.
•In the 23rd century, a small tribe living in a post-apocalyptic forest are hounded by body-painted slavering cannibals as they are visited by their superiors.
I could now tell you all the ways the stories intersect, or how one refers to another from within itself, or how a particular detail — a birthmark, say — keeps recurring, as do the actors, who take on different roles and noses. (Hanks plays six roles and has a different nose for each.) But I’m too lazy for that, too. Instead, I feel I ought to alert you to some fairly weird prosthetics. I’ve seen some strange things at the cinema in my time and now, I suppose, I will have to count among them poor Mr Sturgess, with eyes remodelled to make him look Asian, and Halle Berry donning a white skin, and Hugh Grant as a body-painted, slavering cannibal, although, true to his gift to the world, he is still always noticeably Hugh Grant. And, also, I feel I ought to alert you to the performances, which are wildly uneven, ranging from hammy (Broadbent) through to utterly listless (Berry and Sarandon) and cringe-inducing (Hanks as a shaman, Grant as a curly-haired cockney).
But the weirdest thing is, for a film about recurring connections, how disconnected it all feels. It is disconnected in tone. The retirement scenario, for example, is broadly played as comedy whereas the futuristic strands are played with a horrible and turgid earnestness. And the stories themselves never feel connected, never come together as the one big story. So it’s a cold and distanced and, yes, rather boring experience during which we feel nothing for any of the characters. It is three hours without actually getting anywhere near the place it should have got to. And imagine if National Express did that. It would go bust.
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