"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others."
This was a much anticipated movie for me, so I really wanted to give it a proper sit down and give it my full attention. It turned out it needed it too. The movie falls into the category 'hella long' and with the different story lines, sometimes difficult to understand accents and philosophic punch it feels even longer.
With it being based on a book (which I didn't read) that has 6 separate stories with a specific order, this could not have been translated to the big screen without changing the structure of the stories. So it got chopped into many different smaller pieces and throughout the movie the viewer jumps from one story to another.
It makes for a more proper build up, but it unfortunately also created a big mess that must've been hard to follow for at least a part of the viewers. You can see even the actors having some difficulty with it at times.
It is obvious right from the start that this movie is aiming for a more intellectual public and wants to deliver a wide spectrum of ideas and views. It tries its very best, and succeeds in a multitude of ways, but never grasps the feeling of completion. As much as it brings out a message of everything is connected, the script might have needed a few more rewrites to make it more interconnected itself.
You could argue it is either too long with no strong red line, or too short to succeed in making the connection between stories and between audience and characters. There are the obvious crossovers; like a flashback to a previous story in time and the recurring actors, plus some (broad) recurring themes. But besides that it doesn't link the stories together well enough.
There are many great actors in many different roles they handle quite well. I was especially surprised by Hugh Grant as an oil company executive. Hugo Weaving is, unfortunately, type-casted as the villain in every storyline. He does a great job of course, but with such a diversity of stories and settings I expected him to get a good guy out of it as well. (Besides maybe during the very last scene as an interrogator.)
Also Korean actress Bae Doo Na was a treat playing a sort of 'ghost in the shell' girl in futuristic Neo Seoul. I think something the Wachowski's had a lot of fun with.
It is an interesting and entertaining movie to watch, and I think it is best to watch it at least two or three times. But doing that would just take too much time for making it really worth your while.
There probably will be people who will absolutely love this movie completely, but it is not me. Seeing the 75% rating on trakt is about the best it gets on the internet I am fairly confident to say it isn't for the masses either.
Like six movies muscled into one, Cloud Atlas is a raw, dense, ambitious mash of tangled wires and blinking lights. Needless to say, the film must be seen more than once to fully comprehend, and even then it's a nut that demands a viewer's complete concentration to crack. It's a mosaic, stitching vastly different subjects, atmospheres, landscapes and circumstances into the same cloth with mixed results. Things are so breakneck that, even at three unusually long hours, I felt like I was missing large swaths of story, merely scratching the surface of what was actually going on.
The editing is partly to blame for that, with its dizzying leaps across generations (which, in some instances, occur several times in a single scene), and the heavy makeup effects - employed to cast the same actors in several roles, genders, ages and nationalities - are often a major distraction. For a film as loaded as this one, even a momentary pause to identify a vaguely-familiar face can tangle the feet, leaving us helplessly adrift in a sea of themes and imagery. It alternates between stunning and baffling in the blink of an eye, an experience that's both confounding and mesmerizing to behold.
Kudos to the filmmakers for daring to try something so thoroughly different from the norm. It's magical on the rare occasions it all comes together and works as a single, monumental behemoth, but is also plagued by a swarm of ticks and shortcomings. I wonder if the time and effort necessary to actually access its thematic riches might be a steeper cost than many viewers are willing to pay.
A complicated picture, both to ingest and to rate. Today's score may be subject to change.
I am not sure if I was able the follow the whole story. There are many hard cuts and switches between the different time lines - which can be very confusing.
There are soooo maaany hard cuts, which makes it really hard to understand the whole plot. I like confusing movies but its so hard to follow it sometimes. In the end of the movie they show all the characters which one actors played.
So you get a Aha! in the end.
But the director should have done that in another way during the movie. I am pretty sure I am gonna watch that movie a 2nd time and maybe I gonna write another comment on trakt then.
Some friends watched the movie in the cinema and they told me they felt the same way: confusion.
Confusion is okay for sure but in some way you should answer the open questions. And to do that in the end titles shouldn't be the way to do that.
Tom Hanks did his job well in that movie and some nice ideas in it and not boring. 8/10
Defiantly not a movie where u smoke some weed before watching it. ^^
Review by Reiko LJVIP 6BlockedParent2016-01-02T13:47:10Z
When I first saw the trailer for Cloud Atlas I was entranced. I needed to know more immediately so set about reading the book long before the movie was released; it instantly became my favourite. David Mitchell span a tale which enthralled me and honestly made me rethink the way I went about my whole life.
I was nervous when I saw the movie as surely it wouldn't be able to capture the level of detail and interwoven stories I'd grown to love; but it did! Having read the book first it was easy to find my feet with it and see those people come to life and of course I could follow the story just fine. I wasn't sure if the same could be said for a non-book reader though.
Last night I watched it again but with someone who hadn't read the book. He was a bit taken aback at first and overwhelmed by the sharp changes of stories but he soon settled in. Every so often I would comment to try and gauge if he was following what was happening so far but turns out I didn't need to tell him anything, he easily caught on to it all. We had a long discussion afterwards and he'd even noticed aspects I hadn't! Such as the house Frobisher worked at with Vyvyan being the same one Cavendish was later trapped in! Excellent little detail.
The film could have benefited from emphasising the karma aspect of the book a bit more I think rather than focussing only on the social change/one can make a difference theme.
I feel bad for people who didn't enjoy this movie and found it 'confusing' as they must struggle with a lot of complicated concepts day to day. Perhaps a simple action movie would be better suited for them.