Quantum Leaps

Rating: 1/10 (31 March 2013)

There were more jumps in Cloud Atlas than in a March Madness season, more cuts per minute than inside a Great Clips hair salon – on a busy day and more story lines than in the Bible. What a feat!
Too bad, it far-too-closely resembled the terrible movie-within-the-movie in Gentlemen Broncos. Actually, I would rather watch the fictional film within Gentlemen Broncos than Cloud Atlas again.
It's obvious this is a LOVE-it or HATE-it kind of film, and if only judged by the Oscar snub and America's Box Office receipts for this, I'm not alone in the HATE-it category. But, to be honest and fair, neither when the Academy completely misses a film or when a movie receives low Box Office numbers, it does not equate bad quality for I've seen plenty of fantastic films that basically made nothing and were rejected on award night. So, without using those to measure quality, I'll let this movie speak for itself on how bad it was.
The movie truly had terrible, uninspired and unoriginal dialogue and narrative. Further, the costumes and makeup seemed like they were from a first-year film student that didn't drop out but was kicked out. (I must've laughed out loud a few times with Tom Hanks' multiple of characters and horrendous outfits and makeup.) And while I would normally admire its ambitious drive to cram what could have been a six-part series of films in just shy of three hours, the choppiness of too-many story lines made it feel like the book it's based on had roughly 1,500 chapters, all of which began and ended in under three sentences.
Since I won't be seeing this again, I would just have to guess on how many abrupt transitions there were in between the story lines and timeframes. Probably, the same as my estimate number of chapters of the original manuscript. Again, I would normally rate a film higher that went outside the box and leapt all over the place with the different plots, all in a strobe light rapid pace. But, that feeling of admiration pretty much left me 30 minutes in when it all started to give me a headache. Sadly, as the movie speedily progressed, so did the number of sudden edits and transitions.
I guess the positive part of all the cramming they did in this, is that it gives me more hope for a Kiefer Sutherland 24 movie. It appears it's possible to condense 24 hours of footage down to about three hours.
As for the synopsis, that would be a tough one. And I just watched this film. Well, let's see, there's about 6-7 story lines, many, but not all, star the same actors in different gear and in many different time periods. Supposedly, all are supposed to connect and show a trend/bloodline from the 1800s to the, I don't know, 2500s. And that might be an accurate conclusion to the plot(s), but I either lost interest or was too bored. Even despite the rapid fluctuations of story lines, I found myself thinking of other things I could rather be doing during these three treacherous hours.
I got what I needed to out of it. I understood where each was headed – oh, and that's another thing, none of these 6-7 stories had any remote amount of surprise or originality – so, it was easy to let my mind wander.
When I did pay close attention, and when I thought: "Hey, I might actually like this, finally," they shifted gears once again to more ridiculous and embarrassing characters, flat and completely humorless "comedy" and the CGI was so bad, the landscaping so insipid, it made 2008's Speed Racer seem more, well, normal. I'm aware who directed/wrote this so it shouldn't be a surprise that Agent Smith pops up quite a bit or that one, sorta main character (meaning, no one really is a "main character" when there's just about as many characters are there were extras in Braveheart) completely and unintentionally hilariously mimics Neo: Jim Sturgess's Hae-Joo Chang.
All in all, I might have to rethink my low rating I gave to The Tree of Life. While that was just as trite as this mess, at least the movie moved beautifully through some good cinematography and score. It was just as long and boring, but at least I had pretty scenery to move me.
SKIT IT. Duh.