Lack of structure leads unnecessarily to banality

Rating: 6/10 (13 April 2013)

I quite enjoyed aspects of 'Cloud Atlas'; but to be frank, I didn't understand it. After watching, I consulted Wikipedia, which outlines the plot of the book from which the film is derived; and then it kind of made sense. The central ideas here are based on the notion of reincarnation and recurrence; of each story being told in its successor; and (in the book only) an explicit formal structure whereby each tale is split into two halves, so that each higher level is bookended by its predecessor. This lavish movie (with no less than three directors) abandons this device in favour of telling all six stories simultaneously. With the same actors appearing in many of the segments, the result is somewhat incomprehensible, especially as many of the segments have fantasy settings (and when the viewer is uncertain of the constraints on reality, it's especially hard to tell when one such reality ends and another begins). The individual fragments aren't badly done, but it's very hard to get a clear sense of a bigger picture beyond the banal message of "everything is connected". I would now be interested to read the book; but the film itself is too messy and undisciplined to wholly accommodate such ambitious material.