An Unwatchable, arrogant, confusing mess of a movie.

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 2012)

Grossly over-acted, impossible-to-follow plot lines, absurd accents and the most jumbled editing ever. Boo! We had high expectations for Cloud Atlas. Unfortunately, our group of four smart and frequent movie-goers, walked out on Cloud Atlas after the first two confusing hours of painful cinematic failure. The storyline is complex, the accents are absurd and flawed. The six bizarre and pretentious plot lines jump around so poorly that you are dazed and confused. It's visually compelling, but nearly impossible to follow. Halle Berry, Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant "chew the scenery" with horribly bad accents. The Wachowski's reached to make a complex book into an epic drama and they got terribly lost along the way. I read a lot of great reviews calling this an "epic," but it's a failure. There are aspects of the six stories that are interesting and the actors work hard, but this film is a mess. It's pretentious, long, arrogant and confusing for no good reason. It has been many years since we walked out on a film. About 20 others in the theater left too. We asked a manager as we left what he had heard from people... he said the film was very "divisive" among attendees, some liked it--some hated it, and both groups felt strongly. He indicated the film had a very large number of walkouts by unhappy film goers. I wish I had better things to say about this film... The effort was ambitious and expensive (over $100 Million to make.) It grossed $9 million opening weekend and was described widely as a "bomb." There are a handful of concepts, scenes and topics that are interesting in this film, but there is so much junk in-between that it's not worth the wait.