ponderous, pretentious and sleep-inducing

Rating: 1/10 (31 October 2012)

"Cloud Atlas" was the longest three hours I've spent in a movie theater in a long, long time. Twice I had to hold myself back from walking out. The theme, if you can finally figure it out, is that love and relationships endure throughout time and the heroes or the spirits of the heroes keep showing up in different times in history. But rather show things in some sort of sequence, the movie cuts back and forth from time and place without any warning. You have to keep track of about a half dozen different stories, multiple characters played by the same actors and finally you just throw up your hands and give up. Even if you could figure out the storyline, there's nothing original about it. Oh, and bring a translation book since about 25% of the dialog is in some sort of pidgin-English invented for the movie.
I don't mind movies occasionally trying to shake up the traditional narrative; "Memento" was an outstandingly original twist on the conventional storytelling. But "Cloud Atlas" is not only confusing, it's ponderous, grindingly slow, gratuitously violent, self-important and dull. It cost $100 million to make and it'll no doubt enter the ranks of one of the most expensive flops in movie history. It's not even forgettable---the story is so unintelligible that you really don't have anything to forget when you leave the theater.