While watching, you'll constantly be asking three questions: Who? What? And why?

Rating: 2/10 (29 October 2012)

The Good: The music was very well done. Also, most of the acting was right on. There was one performance, however, that was stiffer than Kristen Stewart's corpse.
The Bad: This movie breaks the fundamental rules of storytelling. Now, this could sound like a good thing, had it been done well, but it wasn't. I'm all for breaking the rules. That's how movies these days stand out from the dozens of remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels. But this one didn't work. Imagine for me this if you would: Take one random episode of each of your 9 favourite TV shows. Now cut each one into sections of less than 60 seconds, then splice them all together in a seemingly random way. This is an accurate representation of the three hours that is cloud atlas. Does that sound like an appealing way to absorb 9+ different stories? All being inter-cut with one another until it's impossible to keep track of them? It also doesn't help that each character is played by the same actor. I know it's supposed to be their "past lives", but it just makes it more confusing.
Now I'm not going to jump on the love/hate bandwagon. There were good things about it, and bad things too. The idiots will say "It's stupid!" and the film snobs will say "Your IQ is low if you didn't get it." I understand that it was about a grand scale idea that our past lives affect our future lives, and vice versa. That's all good, but I think they could've gotten that point across with a less confusing movie. Honestly, I'd rather have watched a 3 hour movie about any one of its many sub-plots rather than all of them edited like this.
The shooting star birthmark held some significance (don't really know what exactly), but with all the dozens of characters, I can't remember for the life of me who had them and who didn't. Go into this movie expecting this: There is no one plot, there are several. However they're not depicted one after another, they all happen simultaneously, and it's your job to keep track and remember every detail. Hint: you won't.