Hugo Weaving's various castings made the most sense to me in that respect.
Tom Hanks' made the least.
"Hugo, can you play all the villains for us?"
"Yes, Mr. Ander-, uh, sure Andy."
"Tom can you..."
"Oh! Can I play these crazy people too?"
"Um... sure."
Clearly they threw just straight reincarnation out the window, as sometimes the comet birthmark character, if indeed it was a character in any sense, passed between all the main actors except Weaving... but it also interacted with all the other actors... so what is the comet birthmark signifying beyond the thematic idea of things passing on? Anything? Who knows...
I thought the movie was well done, but it got waaay too preachy for my taste. Matrix had all sorts of messages about society but it never took the time to tell me "All boundaries can be crossed, because they're all imaginary, just think about it, and you too can break all the rules of society, because that's what good/happy people do..." or whatever it is they said.
I think that preachiness, that urgency of message is part of what stretched it out, and caused some of the stories to be redundant at times. There's not enough time in the movie to 'earn' that from the audience so they had to actually come out and say it, and I'm like, "well if you weren't going to show it, you could've cut the movie to two hours..."
Also, the strange-some language was indecipherable, I much prefer the Firefly/Serenity dialect. And that's the True True.
