Reaching five minutes late to the theatre , i asked a teenage guy sitting next to me about what i had missed and he told me after a one-second thought , "Nothing so far" . That sounded only a bit reassuring as i watched a character walking through the Moroccan desert to sell his rifle . But as the movie moved on , i got more engrossed in it and realised that director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had again skillfully played with multiple story lines ( "21 grams" in 2003) and time frames to bring out the basic human emotions that people from four different countries experience being part of totally different cultures .
In Morocco, Yusef (Boubker Ait El Caid) and Ahmed (Said Tarchani) have just been given a new rifle to help kill jackals praying on their families' goats. In trying to understand the weapons firing capabilities, they innocently shoot at a tour bus.On that bus, American tourist Susan (Cate Blanchett) is hit by the bullet and injured. Her husband Richard (Brad Pitt) attempts to get help for her, while in America, their nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is watching their kids, but wants to go to her son's wedding in Mexico. Finally, in Japan, schoolgirl Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi)wants attention from men, but sadly is a deaf mute.
I read a critic's comments on a popular movie-review site saying that the "the Japanese story just feels totally out of place" but i believe it makes a lot of sense as it brings out a totally different aspect of human emotions that the Japanese schoolgirl experiences due to her unfortunate inabilties .
To sum it all up , the movie is an improved version of "Crash" in the sense that it spans over different cultures and places across the globe with a more realistic understanding of human emotions and events affecting them . Worth mentioning is the excellent background music and cinematography .
