Reviews

After reading some of the words about the director in the reviews and considering what I am going to say I will preface my comments by saying that it is easy to be a critic. I can see a lot of effort has been put into the film, but I have to be honest as a viewer. It seemed too complicated a plot and story. I feel that for a movie to appeal I have to get hooked through one or more of the characters to be pulled in and feel connected. I could not have that connection - the story movement was very awkwardly paced and the back and forth of flashbacks were not obvious, but like some reviews pointed out, you get into it but only after a good portion of the film - you start thinking who was and who is, the transitions are hardly able to be linked. The romance is just not strong enough. Maybe I am too used to the strong performances by all the three actresses, who by themselves are strong, but I just did not feel the depth. I can see that each of the actors tried to do justice to their parts. I know flashback storytelling is hard, but why make it harder by not providing some way of audiences to perceive the separation. It took me quite a while into the whole movie to be able to tell. The evolution of the character of Marianna / Sylvia was not quite there for me. Keep in mind as you read this that I like to watch movies about which I have not read too much, so that I have no idea how it is going to turn out - that is the way I enjoy the movie most. And looking at the box office numbers I think it is not as popular as it could have been.

I don't know what the movie was trying to convey. The movie seemed to have some typical elements of an Indian immigrant experience. But rather than use those aspects to construct an interesting story it went in all different ways. Some aspects made me really cringe and it just got worse and worse. In trying to capture elements of American life and Indian life experiences and combine then in some interesting ways it just made a mess of both. I don't know if it was the bad acting or that I disliked the portrayal of the character - I just kept getting more and more irritated with the protagonist. There were a lot of similarities of the characters with my life situation and would have been enjoyable if only it had come out better.

I generally like Sci Fi stories that have time and space themes. I have watched this episode several times. The first time I found it interesting for the theme and the story twists. As I watched it again and again I found so may inconsistencies that they started becoming more glaring: such as, Worf in the alternate realities share the same memory as the actual one but not the memory of each reality? What happens to the real Worf in each of the alternate realities? Deanna seems to say that he would miss the real Worf in one of the scenes, but is there not a Worf in that reality? When Worf finally takes the shuttle to close the anomaly where is the Worf in that reality? One would think that it would have been possible and not too difficult to plug these inconsistencies.