Saturday, February 20, 2016

Cloud Atlas 2012 4 out of 10 A Bloated Mess


Cloud Atlas 2012 4 out of 10

I get what Cloud Atlas was trying to accomplish, but for me it failed miserably.  A bunch of  different stories with a connected theme that take place over numerous decades and time periods from the past and future.  The description sounds like an interesting concept and with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry it has a quality cast.  

Unfortunately the film was maybe too ambitious in its concept and ends up in my opinion a bloated mess.  I believe the failure of the movie is in the editing.  The stories don't flow nicely together at all and some stories are completely dull and flat taking away from the more interesting pieces.  Even the stories that seem interesting --you are pulled away from and by the time the film returns to them I found myself no longer interested in what happened to the characters.   Unlike a conventional movie that follows a characters journey from beginning to end so that you really care about the characters by films end,  this films editing style made me completely disinterested in all the characters fates.  Love Actually is one of the best examples of a movie telling many stories that all climax around the same time at the end.  Every story in that movie is interesting and it is edited extremely well.  This movie just jumps for one story to the next in such a disconnected way that you start to lose interest in even the most interesting story lines.

The two best story lines in my opinion were the futuristic Japanese style (not to subtle unnecessarily foreshadowed by another storyline) Soylent Green storyline.  This storyline could have been an entire movie.  Instead it gets buried in with a bunch of dull stories about a composer struggling for recognition as he basically writes for an established composer and gets no credit. Another completely random  story about journalist in the 1970's trying to do an expose is just boring.   Instead of trying to weave all of this different stories the director should have either run fully with the sci-fi storyline or even the wacky old folks breaking away from the old folks home.  I would probably give this movie a better rating if it hadn't been so over bloated and tediously long.   The could story lines got lost in a bunch of filler and when you look down at your watch about an hour and a half in and say to yourself  "UGHHH there is still another 40 minutes of this?"   that is never a good thing.



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