Crowded But Inspired, This Will Surely Befuddle First-Time Viewers

Rating: 6/10 (10 December 2014)

Like six movies muscled into one, Cloud Atlas is a raw, dense, ambitious mash of tangled wires and blinking lights. Needless to say, the film must be seen more than once to fully comprehend, and even then it's a nut that demands a viewer's complete concentration to crack. It's a mosaic, stitching vastly different subjects, atmospheres, landscapes and circumstances into the same cloth with mixed results. Things are so breakneck that, even at three unusually long hours, I felt like I was missing large swaths of story, merely scratching the surface of what was actually going on. The editing is partly to blame for that, with its dizzying leaps across generations (which, in some instances, occur several times in a single scene), and the heavy makeup effects - employed to cast the same actors in several roles, genders, ages and nationalities - are often a major distraction. For a film as loaded as this one, even a momentary pause to identify a vaguely-familiar face can tangle the feet, leaving us helplessly adrift in a sea of themes and imagery. It alternates between stunning and baffling in the blink of an eye, an experience that's both confounding and mesmerizing to behold. Kudos to the filmmakers for daring to try something so thoroughly different from the norm. It's magical on the rare occasions it all comes together and works as a single, monumental behemoth, but is also plagued by a swarm of ticks and shortcomings. I wonder if the time and effort necessary to actually access its thematic riches might be a steeper cost than many viewers are willing to pay. A complicated picture, both to ingest and to rate. Today's score may be subject to change.