Like a 3 hour trailer for what would be 6 incredible movies

Rating: 6/10 (9 March 2013)

Like lots of people who have been to see this film, I am a big fan of David Mitchell's book, and as I such I was nervous about seeing the film. I think that had I not read the book, I would not have had a clue what was going on for the majority of the movie.
My main gripe is with the choice to alter the narrative structure. The way the book is laid out, with the first half of each story coming one after another chronologically, and then the concluding each tale in reverse order, the links between them are subtly drawn out and layered to add new meaning. For the film, the writers have chosen to intercut each story so that they all run parallel, which means that links between the stories are really laboured, rather than coming as subtle references. It also means that you are never able to get absorbed in any one character's journey - as soon as you get back into the swing of this particular era, the film cuts to another.
At nearly 3 hours long, the film is lengthy, but paradoxically each of the six stories is only given around 30 minutes of screen time which just isn't enough for such complex narratives. As a result you only get the very bare bones of the plot - which is why I refer to it feeling more like a trailer than a full film. From the book, there is definitely scope to make each narrative into a full length feature, and I would have preferred a series of 6 films as part of a Cloud Atlas franchise.
Having said this, I thought the performances were fantastic, and although the multi role- playing was a little distracting, I did enjoy watching the same actors in each story. The production design was also superb and managed to capture the strange worlds depicted in the book perfectly.