High hopes -- big letdown

Rating: 2/10 (12 April 2013)

I love the Wachowskis and Tom Twyker's work on Run Lola Run. Tom Hanks and Halle Berry have always been marginal for me, so it was the directors that attracted me, not the actors.
The first trailer for Cloud Atlas made it look interesting. I could see some potential. The reality was disappointment after disappointment.
I found the plot to be confusing and hard to follow, filled with meaningless crap. There were vague, implied connections with other parts of the story, but a lot of it was wasted screen time. Maybe it would help if you've read the book, which I haven't.
There were a couple of good (too short) action scenes, which is the only reason I'm giving the movie 2 stars instead of 1.
The acting was flat and uninspired. Lots of makeup, some wonderful sets, photography, colors. But no real story. I didn't care for or even like nearly all of the characters. The only exceptions were Doona Bae as Sonmi (partly because she's so gorgeous), and Keith David as Kupaka (a slave). Hugo Weaving was totally lost and wasted. Hanks and Berry were pretentious and annoying.
When a movie is really good, like a good book, you never want it to end. When this movie was half over, I still couldn't figure out where it was going, and couldn't wait for it to be over -- a bad sign, since it's nearly 3 hrs long.
I could be wrong, but this film feels like one where the big-name, high-priced actors insisted on writing or re-writing a bunch of their own lines, thinking that they know more than the writers and directors. Whatever it was, something went terribly wrong. This was one of the worst films I've seen in a long time.