a review of 异世浮生

Hooptober Night Twenty-Seven: I think 30 years of pop culture references to "Jacob's Ladder situations" (although technically Ambrose Bierce kind of did it first) led to me guessing how things were going to end up pretty early on in this movie. But the overall quality of the filmmaking (Lyne's direction and editing choices, combined with strong performances from Tim Robbins and the whole ensemble) really kept me engaged throughout, and more importantly kept me off-balance in terms of figuring out what the base reality of the movie was. Unlike a lot of other movies in this same vein, there's not really a hard line between fantasy and truth. Each of the time frames seems to come with hard realities that Jacob could have wanted to dissociate and escape from, while at the same time they each contain paradoxes that would preclude their existence. I think I'm going to need to give it another watch in a couple of years and see how I feel about it, but the first time I was pretty bowled over by how intricate it felt without being too dense to follow.