Glad you loved it Bradley

I disagree with trixster, though. Each individual part has its own charm, its own drive, its own integrity, etc., plus obviously a role to play in the overarching vision.

Areed

Yeah, this is definitely the movie of the year. It's incredibly ambitious, full of moments of sublime wonder, and has a very positive message of individuals fighting against forces of oppression. The hyper editing between multiple sequences connected by similar themes and actors allows for a treasure trove of meaning. The music is gorgeous, and while the makeup effects don't always work or are even problematic - the movie has been accused of 'yellow face' by having white actors play all the major male characters in New Seoul - I applaud the film bravely posturing that, "All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended, if only one can conceive of doing so."

The "yellow face" complaints were so exhausting and uncalled for; just idiots racing to prove how PC they are, ignoring the film's entire philosophy of casting. Of course, there were no complaints regarding, say, Halle Berry playing a European Jew or Ben Whishaw playing a woman.

Especially considering those characters exist in the context of the Unilarity, it did indeed some like the accusations were mostly coming from people who haven't even seen Cloud Atlas. I did personally find some of that makeup distracting, but accusing the film of being racist sight unseen is to miss the point completely.

Phoned-in portent and feigned profundity form the basis of each of the seven interlocking narratives that comprise Cloud Atlas, and while they appear superficially distinct (a bit of creaky 1930s manor drama cast against garish near-future sci-fi, etc.), they share the fully consistent qualities of flat acting, shabby editing, and surprisingly uninspired design. That not one of these seven pieces feels like a coherently developed story of its own is perhaps unsurprising (even unfurling over an interminably dull 163 minutes, we simply don't spend enough time with any particular set of characters for a single emotional arc to properly register), but what's remarkable is how poorly they fit together as an ostensibly unified whole. The rhythm of this thing—and when you're composing something this dense, rhythm is everything—just feels entirely wrong, reducing what crumbs of dramatic or kinetic interest are scattered across its running time to dust. This isn't simply a case of elements of the film working or not working; the entire array of ideas (both aesthetic and thematic) which make up the film are so badly integrated that even the smallest traces and flickers of light are snuffed out altogether. Nothing works because, almost by the very nature of its design, nothing can: It collapses so intensely under the weight of its own inanity and pretension that nothing at all is left standing.
As with some of contemporary cinema's other colossal, infamous failures (The Phantom Menace, say, or Andrew Stanton's sometimes strangely similar John Carter), its badness is not merely a matter of minor or even major problems that, had they been solved or excised, would have allowed the truly great film at the core to flourish. This badness is fundamental, an essential aspect of the concept and its execution that I suspect is impossible to remedy or rectify. The details, embarrassing though they very often are, almost seem superfluous: Whether we're talking about the gaudy, conspicuously fake-looking prosthetics worn by nearly every one of the film's principal characters on nearly every occasion (which make most of these actors look like Jerry Lewis in The Family Jewels or Catherine Martell's Chinese businessman costume in the second season of Twin Peaks), the astoundingly awful lead performance by Tom Hanks (who alternates between self-serious mugging and too-goofy clowning around, his interpretation of a brutish Irish author being the worst by some margin), an incoherent editing style which makes mincemeat of conventional spatial orientation within single scenes and of dramatic tension and any sense of suspense across the longer, frequently disjointed passages (when forgetting what's going on in any of the timelines that aren't currently on screen is made worse by the fact that one never actually cares about any of them), and a quaint "lemme tell you a story" framing device so hilariously terrible that it makes the old woman in Titanic look like a pilgrim from Canterbury Tales.

"What is an ocean," one character asks smugly, "if not a multitude of drops?" And what's Cloud Atlas if not a multitude of terrible details and unwatchable moments? When Hanks throws a walking cliché of a stuffy British critic of literature from the rooftop terrace of a high-rise, I very seriously considered walking out; by the time Hugo Weaving shows up in drag as a nursing home bully, I was ready to renounce film criticism altogether and take up a less emotionally or psychologically taxing occupation, like the operator of an emergency suicide hotline (in fact, I could have made use of one myself by the end). The problem isn't that this is one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life; the problem is that it's seven of the worst films I've ever seen in my life glued together haphazardly, their inexorable badness amplified by their awkward juxtaposition. Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski wanted to make a movie unlike any other, and they certainly did: Cloud Atlas is a unique and totally unparalleled disaster.

This gets released in China on Jan 31. Looking forward to it.

Cloud Atlas

I just don't get the films' message, if there indeed was one. I enjoyed it, but I could have enjoyed it much more if if didn't flick back-and-forth between storylines. Just as one storyline was reaching a climax, all of the tension and excitement was killed due to another story's arc being shown.

I can see similarities in personas through the ages, like Hugo Weaving's characters were almost always bad and villainous, and Jim Sturgess' characters were almost always the hero or a revolutionary of some kind, but I don't get the overall message. There was something said by one of Halle Berry's characters about everything being the same until one has the bravery to change it, so I guess that's relatable.

There was 30 minutes cut from the Chinese version, and at the end when it showed who played whom, there were characters in there that I hadn't seen at all (I don't remember seeing the Chinese actress in the movie at all). I can't help but think that those 30 minutes might have helped to explain the films' hidden meaning a little more, so I'm at a little bit of a loss really. If the film was made simply to show that love transcends generations, eras and that it's not a choice, then fair enough, but I'm sure there could have been an easier way to tell that.

Hugo Weaving was by far the best actor in Cloud Atlas, and he had the best characters, but I also loved Hugh Grant (especially as the warrior 106 years after the fall). Halle Berry was the same as she always is, and Tom Hanks kind of annoyed me. The Korean girl's story was the best in Neo Seoul. Most exciting anyway. I thought the cinematography was great throughout, and the score was used well, but if only the editing was better, the score and cinematography could have been lifted along with it. The set design, as well as the visual effects, were great, but the make-up was pretty bad. I liked seeing the white Halle Berry, or the female Hugo Weaving, or the female Ben Whishaw, but it was more of a Where's Wally? game than a revelation in cinema.

B

Haven't finished watching everything there is to watch from 2012, but this was my fave of the year and I doubt it's gonna get dethroned.

The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Each story focuses on an individual who faces the choice of either submitting to or rising against oppression, and a small thread of imagination and rebellion runs from story to story (Broadbent's publisher reads a manuscript of "a Luisa Rey mystery," Sonmi-451 watches a film based on his escape from the nursing home, and so on).

I am glad you enjoyed the film, and I am grateful you for saw it, but there is no way the experience was not compromised in an extreme and negative way by the deletion of 30 minutes.

I did notice that in the earliest storylines, the blacks were slaves, and 106 years after the Fall, they were superior beings and the whites were savages and poor. I think this has some significance, and it's not justice.

But yes, I did enjoy it overall. But it's just not that special. I enjoyed it more than Lawless (another "B" graded movie from me).

I'd like to watch it again, but only the uncut version. We only saw this version of Cloud Atlas because Skyfall was too expensive and we wanted to go to the cinema on Saturday morning. We've found cheap Skyfall seats tomorrow morning, so we'll go and see that again. I can't wait until I move to a country that doesn't extremely cut movies. It happened with Looper, now with Cloud Atlas, and there are minor cuts to ALL foreign movies all of the time. It's incredibly annoying. Add that to the fact that not all movies come out here and it's hell, and the worst thing is...I'm not Chinese. I have seen a better way of doing things, so it aggravates me more.

Ok. But is each similarly-looking character connected by some sort of energy (deja vu)? or was that just a marketing tool to promote the movie, because I swear that that was how it was put across in press conferences etc.

I imagine the uncut version will make a bit more sense. I'm kind of in love with this movie

I got the impression that the movie was showing the path of the soul through time as it grows or degenerates.

Hmm, ok, that's an interesting theory. I suppose that could be in play too. The thing with this film is that I'm just not bothered to find out. Perhaps because I'm late to the party or perhaps because the film just isn't that appealing. I wish I knew.

Indeed, the film tends to have that affect on the majority of people that have seen it, a good portion outright dislike the film. For me the film connected emotionally, that doesn't happen to me very often.

Nicely said, David - - your writing is getting better and better!

I really wanted to like this (surely would have made those 3 hours more bearable) but I thought it was terrible. I give them credit for taking on such an ambitious story but I thought it was a bit of a mess. It's easy to see why the book was considered unadaptable. I hated the non-linear storytelling. I found the narrative confusing and the jumping around makes it difficult to get truly invested in any of the stories. I would have preferred each story to be told individually.

The acting is fine but having the actors playing several different characters was incredibly distracting and made it all feel kind of silly. It only served to take me out of the story even more. The language in the story with Tom Hanks as a tribesman would have been completely indecipherable if it weren't for the subtitle option on the Blu-ray.

This is well-done on a technical level and it's easy to admire some of the visuals, but so many elements made the film impossible to take seriously. I felt no emotional connection to any of the stories in the film. It's full of ideas but none of them ever connect and it ends up feeling empty. The only story that was remotely interesting was the one about the clone with Doona Bae. Other than that I was incredibly bored by the film.

D+

Definitely an enjoyable, easy to get through, 3-hour adventure.

I recently watched this again on HBO and it still blew me away. One of the best movies of 2012 by far. Just breathtaking.