Not as big a deal as it thinks it is.

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2012)

It's not that the film is weak, it's not that at all. Right from the start of the movie it is clear how the whole movie is going to unfold. Within the first few minutes you are introduced to six different stories which, we are expected to realize, due to the fact that the same actors feature in each, that they are all interwoven. It does, however, feel like you are watching six movies at the same time and it is just a montage of scenes from movies Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Tom Hanks and Halle Berry have featured in. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here so I'm going to be as vague about the following as I can possibly be. However, if you have not seen the movie and wish to go into it knowing nothing about it beyond the long-winded trailer, I suggest you skip to the brackets after these next two sentences. The first scene with Tom Hanks as a tribesman features an emotional event we are clearly expected to cry at. In short, we don't. (YOU CAN START READING AGAIN) This nearly defines the movie in it's entirety. We are thrown between stories so often that we don't have time to grow attached to any of the characters. The efforts of the directors to go into as much emotional detail as possible proves futile as we know far too little about the characters. The characters are so complex that it would take far longer than half an hour or less (which is what we are given) to feel any personal link between the two. The most emotional scene in the movie still is not enough to bring a tear to the eye of a person watching it for the first time. It might, however, work on someone who is watching the movie for the third or fourth time because they have been given time to break down the character. We are left trying to figure out what happened in story A and how it connects with story B while we are being shown historic events in story C and, while we are seeing these time-changing events unfurl, we are still too preoccupied trying to figure out why the hell that happened in story D to know what is happening. It can be argued by some man who calls himself film geek that "superior intellect is required to understand Cloud Atlas" but that is not true. The stories are not THAT complex, you just need more time than you are given in the cinema, where you can't pause or rewind, to think about it. It will become some sort of cult classic because people are going to start reading too deep into the story when really all there is is that people are living the same lives at different times over and over again. It is quite an interesting concept that souls are crossing paths again and again and that people, for example, feel as though they have seen something before because they saw it in their past life. Redeeming features are the photography and one small, quite detached story about an old publisher in debt who is tangled up in a series of unfortunate events that act as the porter in Macbeth, providing very little more than comic relief. In conclusion, I do recommend the movie but don't get your hopes up. It is not all it is made out to be by the trailer, falling just short of six minutes. The movie would make more sense if it was the, lets say, 35-plus hours long it would need to be to explain every story properly. Each story is beautifully crafted but just not long enough. It's more like the book was a collection of short stories that are loosely connected than a novel.