With its overwhelming five-minute trailer, “Cloud Atlas” boldly announced itself over the summer as the most ridiculous movie ever made. Love! Death! Birth! Everything is connected! Ever since then, people have been wondering if it’ll be a triumph for ambitious independent filmmaking or a total failure, but it has managed to occupy the in-between area that nobody thought possible. “Cloud Atlas” isn’t an artistic masterpiece, or even a coherent standalone work, but it’s a breezy three hours if you’re game.

Based on David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, “Cloud Atlas” connects six stories that would normally have little business playing at the same theater, let alone in the same movie. All the stories star a main character with a comet-shaped birthmark engaged in a beautiful fight for love and free will in our world of Nietzchean power struggles, but otherwise it’s a crapshoot. We start with Adam Ewing, a 19th century lawyer who befriends a slave stowaway on a boat trip to America. Tom Hanks is also onboard as an evil doctor who gets Ewing addicted to heroin. Then there’s Robert Frobisher (Ben Wishaw), whose Amadeus-style rivalry with another composer (Jim Broadbent) is complicated by an affair with the composer’s wife (Halle Berry, in whiteface).

Alright…I actually don’t want to spend half a review describing all of the stories. If you haven’t read the book, you won’t understand what’s happening after the first hour: the film starts off by introducing you to the separate threads with some grace, but after that it starts cutting between them so quickly that all coherence is lost. Scatterbrained as it was, the book had a pretty smooth structure, playing the first half of each story in ascending chronological order before the second halves in reverse. Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Twyker have taken the novel’s jigsaw puzzle and thrown it into a paper shredder, making any emotional engagement with the characters impossible and rendering some of the book’s pomo-wink-wink lines —“A half-finished book is a half-finished love affair”— meaningless. At times the film seems less adaptation than dissertation, quoting liberally across the novel’s storylines to tease out its ‘deeper’ themes without letting first-timers in.

But to write “Cloud Atlas” off as a masturbatory pseudo-academic exercise ignores how consistently entertaining it is. Maybe the film’s Internet publicity campaign—a five-minute trailer, interviews with the normally-reclusive Wachowskis, lots of Tom Hanks viral videos—gives some hint to what kind of experience it wants to be. It’s less a movie than a three-hour reddit binge: moments of “wow,” “LOL,” “aww,” and “WTF” all intertwine with little substance connecting them. There are moments of epic cinematic glory, moments that fall flat, and many, many moments in which actors dress in silly, meme-ready costumes. Tom Hanks as a cockney thug is a standout, but there’s also lots of cross-dressing and questionable yellow/white/brownface going on. There’s one storyline with Hugh Grant as a post-apocalyptic cannibal and Hugo Weaving as an evil leprechaun.

So…it’s not “Citizen Kane,” but it’s not “The Fountain” either. For a film that wears its artistic ambitions so loudly, it’s surprisingly kitchy and unpretentious. You have to want to like “Cloud Atlas” and the people who made it going in, but if you enter the theater with a good attitude, it’ll be a refreshing three hours.