You're dropped in medias res into various historical vignettes with Robin Williams role playing men in different time periods.
The stories are supposed to have some connection to each other. Most of them feature vaguely similar elements, such as priests, slaves, and, of course, female love interests for Williams' character.
So the filmmakers wax philosophical, but it falls flat on its face. Most of the stories aren't fleshed out well enough to really get a grasp of what's happening. The one where they're stranded on a desert, especially, makes very little sense without backstory. Despite the presence of Robin Williams, there's no comedy to speak of either, and the drama is ineffective.
The narrator with the obnoxious voice and speaking style also gets less loquacious as the movie goes along. I think she doesn't even talk at all during the last story.
It might have been helped by a little bit more backstory by the narrator or story development within each piece by the filmmakers, but even that probably wouldn't have saved it. The film is disjointed, a bit boring, and pointless. The philosophical message tying all the stories together doesn't spring up effectively and the movie didn't need to be in such a convoluted format. As it stands, only the bit where Robin Williams was a slave was very interesting. The rest was just Robin Williams playing random roles in bits of mediocre movies.
Honourable Mentions: The Human Condition (1959). The title of both of these works is extremely arrogant, somehow promising to finally put the whole human condition on display but failing miserably. Human Condition was definitely less arrogant in its assumption, though.
The stories are supposed to have some connection to each other. Most of them feature vaguely similar elements, such as priests, slaves, and, of course, female love interests for Williams' character.
So the filmmakers wax philosophical, but it falls flat on its face. Most of the stories aren't fleshed out well enough to really get a grasp of what's happening. The one where they're stranded on a desert, especially, makes very little sense without backstory. Despite the presence of Robin Williams, there's no comedy to speak of either, and the drama is ineffective.
The narrator with the obnoxious voice and speaking style also gets less loquacious as the movie goes along. I think she doesn't even talk at all during the last story.
It might have been helped by a little bit more backstory by the narrator or story development within each piece by the filmmakers, but even that probably wouldn't have saved it. The film is disjointed, a bit boring, and pointless. The philosophical message tying all the stories together doesn't spring up effectively and the movie didn't need to be in such a convoluted format. As it stands, only the bit where Robin Williams was a slave was very interesting. The rest was just Robin Williams playing random roles in bits of mediocre movies.
Honourable Mentions: The Human Condition (1959). The title of both of these works is extremely arrogant, somehow promising to finally put the whole human condition on display but failing miserably. Human Condition was definitely less arrogant in its assumption, though.