Some Movies Are Challenging. This is one of them.

Rating: 9/10 (3 February 2013)

Films like Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive and Cloud Atlas challenge the viewer. Cloud Atlas is not a single narrative. It is a very complex layering of six stories. Adding to its complexity, the principal actors play several roles. The stories do not appear to be connected at first, except that you are seeing some of the same actors. '
The movie is long, almost 3 hours, and for the first 90 minutes, you want to get your mind around where all these stories are going. You want to know how they are related. It isn't possible. Cloud Atlas is a challenging film because you must take it in without thinking too much. The stories are interwoven and are related tenuously, but you cannot put the connections together until after the mid-point.
As we revisit these stories, the structure takes shape for us. Cloud Atlas is unlike any film I have ever seen. Kieslowski's trilogy "Blue," "White" and "Red" dealt with the interconnectedness of people by telling stories about people who lived in the present day, but in different communities. Their lives touched on the periphery. Cloud Atlas deals with a metaphysical connectedness of people through time. The universe exists today as the aftermath of a large explosion which took place 13.7 billion years ago. Everything around us flows from that event. Similarly, everything in Cloud Atlas is related through time because of the repercussions of events in our past. There is a strong theme of reincarnation running through the stories.
This is a brilliant film and an epic achievement, but it requires the audience to work a little. This should have been one of the 10 best for 2012.