Review
This movie is a fusion of several genres (drama adventure scifi comedy romantic tragedy) as well as an attempt for an arthouse cerebral movie to attain commercial blockbuster status. In my opinion it mostly succeeds but finding a large mainstream audience is its biggest challenge to be met (at this point before wide release).
Imagine taking six short (but bigbudget) films with different stories and directors and combining them into an anthology feature united by a common theme and cast of actors in different roles and then editing the entire thing out of sequence. The "nested" narrative of the book has been rearranged for the sake of the visual medium of film and after first being introduced to the 6 worlds it's not that hard to keep track of who's who what's what and where & when. Frankly it's a shooin for an Oscar nomination for Best Editing it works very well considering the challenge of making it flow coherently.
The cinematography set & art design music score and performances range from good to great. The makeup in some cases created a distraction (a Korean woman transformed into a redhaired Caucasian Hugo Weaving as a buxom female nurse) but it adds a bit of fun to the experience. There's a smörgåsbord of material here for most people human drama mystery violence sex adventure farcical comedy gloomy scifi and occasional romance (both gay and straight). It's 6 movies for the price of one! Just be ready to spend almost 3 hours in your seat and suffer a bit of whiplash as the transitions can get frenetic at times with multiple cliffhangers happening simultaneously. Like a good rollercoaster it has its lulls and rushes. Some might find the finale a bit conventional sappy or anticlimactic. But there's no denying this is a big expensive gamble on the part of the Wachowskis and their producers. Hopefully it'll achieve the kind of success they got with the first "Matrix" and not the fate of the abysmal "Speed Racer." (PS I saw the film at its world premiere at TIFF.)