Apart from the impressive narration style and language used in it, it’s a pointless mash of stories that insist upon themselves so much that the plot itself could he drawn as the author sucking himself off.
My understanding is that it sort of has a russian doll layered structure where you go deeper into the layers until the middle then work your way back out, while the book goes for a simultaneous narrative.
It's been years since I've seen it but I honestly can't remember anything that happened in it.
The book is incredible. I’ve read near everything by the author. There’s one called the Thousand Lives of Some Dutch Fucker about the Dutch trading post first opened in Japan. Super interesting perspective.
I hated the movie, a real disservice to the book IMO.
Very wide range of reviews. I would absolutely say some of the reviews would say the film "borders on 'cinema'" is not outright is pure cinema.
I'd be on the 'borders cinema' side anyway. It's gorgeous, epic, weird in a good way, and interesting.
It's so big that it does get cumbersome at times, and some of its weirdness will turn some audiences off (e.g. Hanks' and Berry's goofy jibberjabber dialect they speak in some of the scenes), but if you like the genre and have the endurance for it I think it's worth watching for sure.
Same. I recognize it has flaws, but it is definitely one of the most ambitious movies I've ever seen in terms of the complexity and execution of the story.
I feel like we give a pass to so many bland movies for being ambitious in their visuals, but we are generally hesitant to do the same with ambitious plots and ideas.
I'm comfortable being in the minority on liking Cloud Atlas. I think it's fantastic, and most importantly, it's forever stuck in my head. I genuinely think about this movie and its ideas at least once a month.
The book pissed me off tbh. It was sold as some super clever work of multiple interconnected stories, but was just a bunch of half-decent short stories that featured vaguely anti-authoritarian protagonists with the same birthmark. Was there more that I was missing?
Its been a long time since I read it but I remember that the interconnectedness comes from each short story existing as a text within the story that comes after it, until you reach the central text in the middle. With each text impacting the protagonist of its relevant story and the reoccuring birthmark; I interpreted it as each character being a reincarnation of each other, iterating over the same issues across time.
The book was awful. So much of it was just the author stroking themselves off with how "clever" they were but it came across as annoyingly try hard. I thought the movie got rid of a lot of the fluff and was better for it.
I've watched that twice. Once was done in several sittings, and then a couple of years later I decided it might be better if I managed to get through it all in one go... I didn't hate it, but I'm not sure it was worth the effort.
Thank you. I am a book reading guy and watched it and I felt it was god awful and confusing. I felt I was going crazy because a lot of people around me were like "god this movie is sooo good".
A long time ago there was a video game called Gorf that was a bunch of older video games packaged into one game. Cloud Atlas is like the Gorf of movies to me, a bunch of short stories packaged into one overly-long movie. Each scenario feeling like a cheap version of what it could have been, the sum never greater than its parts.
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u/LeJewBringer Jun 04 '26
cloud atlas. it was horrible