Fortune Cookie Dialog Weighs Heavily

Rating: 5/10 (13 April 2013)

The Wachowski brothers are back with top actors Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in "Cloud Atlas" that has some of the feel, pomp, and grandeur of Chris Nolan's "Inception" or the brothers earlier "Matrix" movies. One of the problems though is the apparent weakness in the supposed overall connection with all the different stories.(Spoilers)I was hoping for a better tie-in than some shooting-star birth marks shared with many of the characters across space and time. Also several of the stories were shallow or not well developed particularly the 2012 and the 1936 time- frames. What really lost it for me though was the Fortune Cookie aphorisms and simplifications like "conventions in lives are boundaries" or "love is everything" that should NOT be narrated - do the writers think we need to be spoon-fed? There's some Kooky kumbaya detectable, and avid film-goers deserve better. Too bad too, as Cloud Atlas has a pretty nifty production design, and the futuristic sci/fi stories are fairly good despite the dialog. Perhaps sticking with just that final Sci-fi pairing and developing a deeper story between them would've been stronger. This one deserves a mixed/so-so rating.