Way to long and difficult to follow.

Rating: 4/10 (14 April 2013)

This is a three hour long movie and for such a long movie it had better be good. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Cloud Atlas.
It probably took me about an hour just to understand what was happening in the movie. In the movie we follow the stories of different people in different time eras. We get to see only a few minutes of each story at a time before it switches to another so it's very difficult to follow the storyline in each story. The stories also belong to very different genres, for example the story about the old man is a pure comedy and suddenly the movie switches another story where someone is being brutally killed. It makes it hard to sustain the interest for each story because you're busy trying to switch between your feelings (laughing, being excited, being shocked, etc.) and remembering what happened in the last scene of each story.
In the end I was able to start seeing a connection between most of the stories and once you start to understand what is going on it gets better. The idea behind the story (or stories) is good but the movie is both too long and doesn't do the idea justice. I guess I'll have to read the book to see if it's not better.
The only good thing I can say about Cloud Atlas is that it has beautiful colors and visual scenes, and that the story gets better towards the end.