Disappointed

Rating: 1/10 (2 January 2013)

Oh Hollywood, thank you for your use of music. It's the lube you use as a courtesy while you attempt to mentally rape me. It's the way you can make the emptiness seem profound. It's the way you make me feel as if I've learned a secret of life while being indoctrinated to the insidiousness of big oil, the heartlessness of corporations, the racism of Christianity, the crushing of the weak by the rich, the need for an anti-Capitalist revolution and the beauty of gay love. Your music is the cherry flavoring of the poison you have once again spoon fed me through my entertainment, a power you abuse without apology. The idea of Cloud Atlas, that people are bound through lifetimes, is one that I'm not sold on. Conversely, the common binding of the same stale ideology through reincarnations of cinema, sold with the power of music, that, you have once again demonstrated.
As much as I wanted to like this film and as much as I had hoped that this film would be creative and inspiring, I just found little of value here. This is just another demonstration of one of thousands of Hollywood propaganda pieces designed to brainwash the masses through your entertainment and push a liberal agenda.
The gist is nothing deeper than the idea of reincarnation and soul mates. There is really nothing new that this film adds to any schools of thought and it contains no idea that you didn't already more comprehensively examine when you were 19 and stoned.
The changing of stories is also nothing new to the movie industry. I've heard people describe the movie as difficult to understand or complex, but it's not. Memento was a pioneer in this realm and uncreative Hollywood types have been milking the technique for all it's worth ever since. Been there, done that. When stories start skipping around like this you should realize it's multi-threaded. At that point pay attention and just go with it and hopefully the director ties everything up well at the end and you don't realize that you've just wasted 3 hours with no payoff.
Multi-threaded stories are pretty common now. It's how Hollywood makes you think with a structure rather than a worthy plot. It's how they create a sense of complexity out of a void and in this scenario makes it next to impossible to care about any of the stories or characters.
The stories were boring, the acting was nothing special at best and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. At one point a gay man kills himself. I really don't know why, nor do I care. I know from the music that the film wanted me to care and to be emotionally invested, but nope, couldn't care less. The guy that committed suicide seemed like a self centered egomaniac douche and if there was any characteristic of him that would make me care about him, I didn't see it. I think the only character that I remotely liked was the escape slave, but perhaps just the idea of escaping made me happy after two hours into this film.
As stated above, the music is fine enough and gives you the sense that you're growing as a person, but when you actually think about it, there is nothing new, ground-breaking, or even particularly interesting going on here.
I really thought that there was a distinct chance as I was watching, that the film would take all the little pieces of crap, stick them together and I would be amazed by the brilliant piece of art that was revealed. Nope! It was just a bunch of crap stuck together. You were expecting some genius ending that unfortunately no one had the talent to produce. Kinda like "Lost". With Lost JJ wrote himself into a box he did not have the talent to coherently write himself out of, but at least Lost was interesting along the way.
I read another review that stated that there are a lot of people who are praising this movie because they're afraid that others will think they're stupid for not getting the movie. I think that is very true because I have yet to hear one rational explanation of why this film is not horrible. Here's the bad news, they are stupid. Not because they are so dumb that they don't get it, but because they're so dumb that they don't realize there's nothing there to begin with and they don't possess the mind to question it. I know Tom Hanks is in it. I know Halle Berry is in it. (SPOILER ALERT: I am about to reveal the most mind-blowing aspect of this film.) Tom Hanks and Halle Berry can be in a crap movie!
This film is best watched with subtitles as the clarity of the words is not great in some parts and is obscured by dialects in other parts, including the ebonicy dialect that adds nothing in the post apocalyptic story between Hanks and Berry. Not only did that one particular dialect add nothing, but it subtracted and distracted from the story with how silly it sounded. It honestly reminded me of Jar Jar Binks and nothing good reminds you of Jar Jar Binks!
Personally, I found my mind drifting and contemplating much deeper topics such as how much money you could make if you actually went to Hollywood with the skills to make someone look old rather than plastic. I'm looking at you too Prometheus! Some of the makeup jobs looked quite atrocious.
If you think you might like a film made up of a nougatty center of liberal brainwashing with a coating of stale ideas then by all means see this movie. On the other hand if you can tell the difference between deep sounding music and actual depth, then you'll probably be disappointed too.