Tries to have it both ways
I can be down with total surrealistic weirdness, like Holy Motors or Lost Highway, that has no rational explanation. Or on the other hand, I'm always down for a good science fiction story. But this, I found ultimately unsatisfying, because it seemed to try to pretend that everything we were seeing was explainable through some kind of scientific gobbledygook, only there's just no way. You can't take an ampule and have your physical body disappear, and then come back years later and have a body again, complete with raggedy clothes...then disappear again.
I expected her to find in the "real" world that people were all lying on hospital beds or something, getting their sustenance and excretions taken care of through tubes and whatnot (sort of like the Matrix I guess). When they instead seem to indicate that people are crossing back and forth (especially this idea that they can go both ways) but have no physical bodies while on the "other side"...no, that just lost me.
Edited to add--Elizabeth Weitzman of the NY Daily News nails it:
The vividly hallucinatory visual elements, and starkly contrasted dual entities, are undeniably cool. They’re also, alas, so ill-conceived as to be meaningless. There’s no coherence in either world — or even a reasonable link between the two. Instead, both feel frustratingly half-developed. It’s as if Folman spent a fortune on the first draft of a script he wrote while he was high.
His efforts might best be characterized as an admirable disappointment. It’s not so hard to imagine that Hollywood would do anything possible to immortalize its moneymakers. And Folman’s attempts to make something out of this compelling concept are commendable — even if you’ll inevitably find yourself wondering how Spike Jonze or Charlie Kaufman might have better handled the subject matter.
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