Cloud Atlas

Now that the election is behind us, let's focus on more useful things - Movies!

Mrs. gearboy and I watched it this weekend. We listened to the audiobook first (19 whopping hours long!). Without that, I think we would have spent the first half hour completely lost as to what was happening (so I'm wondering if anyone saw the movie without reading the book, and could follow the story lines).

The book was structured as a  19th century shipboard memoir within a series of muscician's  letters within a 1970's corporate thriller book within a nursing home breakout caper movie within future dystopian "corpacracy history" recorded in an archive within a story told by a distant postapocalyptic future goat herder. It would have been impossible to film as written, since the stories each end half way through, then pick up one after another to finish. As a nearly 3 hour movie, that would have meant following a story for 90 minutes and then starting ANOTHER movie. But they decided to interleave each scene, with common thematic elements connecting each story (along with the same group of actors in different roles and degrees of importance in the stories). Although they changed what I thought was the essential message of the book, I thought it worked nicely as an adjunct to the book. 

At times, trying to figure out who was acting under all the latex was a bit distracting. Hugo Weaving was always a bad guy, though. I heard one reviewer say that between this and the Matrix movies, it seems the Wachowskis want everyone in history to be afraid of him.

Like I said, the stories are quite diverse, and the book is really rather amazing, with very different styles that each stand on their own, and some common themes. The movie seems like it would be hard to stand alone, without knowing in advance how it works. Although, perhaps like Inception or Memento, watching it a couple of times would help it make more sense?

It only got 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I think that's because critics either found it too confusing, or were ranking it as a standalone piece of art, which I think does make it weaker.

Anyone else catch it or read the book?