Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I read David Mitchell's source novel quite a while ago and enjoyed it immensely. The most striking thing about the novel is its structure of six interconnected and nested stories, spanning a large time span, from the nineteenth century to the distant future. Because of the structure it would seem to be one of those novels that is unfilmable. This didn't stop Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis from making this 172-minute masterpiece or folly, depending on your point of view.  They decided to move away from the Russian doll structure of the novel and instead try to tell the six stories in parallel, jumping frequently from one story to another, creating a kind of mosaic. On paper this sounds nuts, but (maybe because I had read the novel so had some familiarity with the stories) I found myself thinking after about ten minutes that this is fine, what's the problem? To emphasise the interconnectedness of the stories (or maybe to cut production costs), the six actors who play the six m...