Cloud Atlas - Wachowski's movie with epic story - Page 20

On March 13 2013 18:37 powerfulcheeses wrote:
I watched Cloud Atlas in the theatre originally, and didn't like it at all. I wasn't too sure why, but I knew I didn't. I usually try to get over my ego as an audience member and approach films on their own terms, so I really wanted to see it again. Why didn't I like it? It's big, sprawling, ambitious, and supposedly about big questions. Everything I like in film.

I recently rewatched Cloud Atlas on Blu Ray to give it another shot.

Honestly, it was an endurance test. It took me so long to get through it, I kept switching to other more enjoyable films, like Wrath of the Titans.

I tried to write what I liked about it but the only thing I could think of was the score was really nice at times. Even the cinematography which is usually something you can count on in large epics was one note and phoned in. I suppose that how they managed to make the stories comprehensible and fit could be am example of solid editing, but I found the editing pretty ordinary except for a couple of the very showy and oh-so-clever cuts accross time and space.

I thought the acting was skin deep and frankly distracting. Tom Hanks was, in particular, very grown worthy. The scene between his scientist character and Halle Berry was one of the times where I realized I had better movies to watch that night. The prosthetics and make-up weren't believable and ejected me from the story each time a new incarnation of JIm Sturgess popped up. I wonder whether that is just to my own familiarity with the stars or whether the movie would have been better suited casting unknowns or different actors for the different incarnations of the same character (like I'm Not There). Also I'm not sure if the acting was as silly as I think or if it's just the film itself that was silly.

The film is so unelievably on the nose it becomes painful to watch. The dialogue is on the nose, the editing is on the nose, the direction is on the nose. It's almost like they expected the audience to be so confused by the basic premise that they felt any subtlety would go over their heads and they wouldn't "get" it. The problem for me is that there wasn't much to "get" in the first place. The themes are all so unoffensive and predictable that I can't fathom anyone seriously getting excited over them. History repeats itself, what you do has meaning beyond, stories can connect disparate places people and times, freedom is good, how you live your life has consequences. I mean you can glean most of that by watching the trailer. At the same time the film is extremely self-important. How they managed to make such an epic, sweeping film, with incessant nagging about the themes in the dialogue without provoking any new or interesting ideas is astonishing. It's worth watching as an example of how a whole lot can end up meaning very little. It actually gets me worked up just writing about it because it seems to assume the viewer is in preschool.

Anyways I could go on I feel like I vented enough.

TLDR: Cloud Atlas is less enjoyable than Wrath of the Titans

On March 13 2013 18:37 powerfulcheeses wrote:
I watched Cloud Atlas in the theatre originally, and didn't like it at all. I wasn't too sure why, but I knew I didn't. I usually try to get over my ego as an audience member and approach films on their own terms, so I really wanted to see it again. Why didn't I like it? It's big, sprawling, ambitious, and supposedly about big questions. Everything I like in film.

I recently rewatched Cloud Atlas on Blu Ray to give it another shot.

Honestly, it was an endurance test. It took me so long to get through it, I kept switching to other more enjoyable films, like Wrath of the Titans.

I tried to write what I liked about it but the only thing I could think of was the score was really nice at times. Even the cinematography which is usually something you can count on in large epics was one note and phoned in. I suppose that how they managed to make the stories comprehensible and fit could be am example of solid editing, but I found the editing pretty ordinary except for a couple of the very showy and oh-so-clever cuts accross time and space.

I thought the acting was skin deep and frankly distracting. Tom Hanks was, in particular, very grown worthy. The scene between his scientist character and Halle Berry was one of the times where I realized I had better movies to watch that night. The prosthetics and make-up weren't believable and ejected me from the story each time a new incarnation of JIm Sturgess popped up. I wonder whether that is just to my own familiarity with the stars or whether the movie would have been better suited casting unknowns or different actors for the different incarnations of the same character (like I'm Not There). Also I'm not sure if the acting was as silly as I think or if it's just the film itself that was silly.

The film is so unelievably on the nose it becomes painful to watch. The dialogue is on the nose, the editing is on the nose, the direction is on the nose. It's almost like they expected the audience to be so confused by the basic premise that they felt any subtlety would go over their heads and they wouldn't "get" it. The problem for me is that there wasn't much to "get" in the first place. The themes are all so unoffensive and predictable that I can't fathom anyone seriously getting excited over them. History repeats itself, what you do has meaning beyond, stories can connect disparate places people and times, freedom is good, how you live your life has consequences. I mean you can glean most of that by watching the trailer. At the same time the film is extremely self-important. How they managed to make such an epic, sweeping film, with incessant nagging about the themes in the dialogue without provoking any new or interesting ideas is astonishing. It's worth watching as an example of how a whole lot can end up meaning very little. It actually gets me worked up just writing about it because it seems to assume the viewer is in preschool.

Anyways I could go on I feel like I vented enough.

TLDR: Cloud Atlas is less enjoyable than Wrath of the Titans

On March 16 2013 10:12 Spekulatius wrote:
That movie is a waste of time and money imo.

But I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Can anyone who claims to have "understood" the movie try and explain what is so "deep" about it? If it's only about the Karma thing, I don't see what the hype is all about and why it needed 6 plots(which for themselves were more than mediocre, except maybe for the composer's part) to tell one story?

+ Show Spoiler +

On March 16 2013 17:37 Spekulatius wrote:

No need to "geez" me.

I was genuinely trying to find out why some people find it to be such a meaningful movie which made me weary if I missed something. It probably wouldn't change my opinion of it much but it could make me disrespect the people less who say "oooh Cloud Atlas is so deep if you didn't like the movie you simply didn't get it".

On March 16 2013 21:04 MasterOfPuppets wrote:


Pretentious hipsters will be pretentious hipsters. This kind of people will take even a putrid pile of shit and call you a moron for failing to see some deeper, hidden meaning (that is often not there, btw), they're literally nothing more than tryhard posers seeking validation from their peers, which they accomplish by pretending to enjoy pretentious or obscure art. It has little to do with the art in question, it could be great or it could be terrible, the problem is how idiotic and petty this kind of people is.

I haven't seen Cloud Atlas yet and I might choose to do so at some point in the near future. Hopefully it will prove to be more than just a pretentious flick full of faux-philosophy.

On March 16 2013 21:32 levelping wrote:


Calm down geez. Daray didn't even talk about a deeper meaning. He explicitly says there isn't much to understand...

On March 16 2013 21:00 levelping wrote:



What I liked about Cloud Atlas is that it doesn't really expect you to find any deep meaning in it. It just presents you with these stories, and lets you draw you own conclusions. Some people might be deeply moved by some things, and others might just see it as a bunch of stories. And I think that's qutie brave for a movie these days. To invite the audience (which most movies presume are really dumb) to think on their own, reach their own conclusions on things. Sure there were some themes that were emphasised a bit more (slavery, the oppression of minorities, the search for truth...) but I don't think that these draw you to a particular "meaning" of the film as a whole (in the sense that it is preaching you a message). The themes are just things that happen in the course of the story.

A good way to understand what I'm saying is to draw some comparisons to movies which I think CLEARLY are trying to impose the flim maker's views on you. And I find those far more "self important" (to borrow the phrase from another poster here) than Cloud Atlas. Inception is (imo) one such film as it imposes a very specific internal logic on the audience. Another Nolan film, the Dark Knight is in my view similar, in that the themes are very stark and are meant to be "take-away" messages for the audience. And least I be accused of a Nolan hater, I think the Matrix films also fall into this trap of having a rather didactic message for the audience.

Cloud Atlas is different I think, in that it is open to interpretation (at least much more than the average movie today).

On March 16 2013 21:37 MasterOfPuppets wrote:


I wasn't even talking about Daray... you're taking my words out of context. Read Spekulatius' post again, then read mine again. And if you're still not sure, you can look at some of the earlier pages on this thread to see exactly what I'm talking about. ^^

On March 16 2013 22:13 levelping wrote:


Ah. I see. So you took a conversation between two people to go on your own tangential rant about pretentious hipsters. Alright, please do carry on.

@ Spekulatius

I'd admit that I am speaking as someone who read the synopsis of the book so from a technical point of view I can apprecite the difficulties they had to deal with when adapting the story for a visual medium. I think some of the execution bits that didn't really sit well (like the make up on actors) is really a limitation of film because unlike a book where you can identify a character as possibly a reincarnation or as having shades of another character, or even not address the point entirely and let the reader through the exposition draw his inferences, the film has to be slightly more directed, and so you need visual queues like the make up. Personally I found it a bit odd too, but given the limitations I was willing to give it a pass.

Which stories did you find bland? I think that the slave ship one is arguably the weakest since there's nothing much going on, and maybe the one about the nuclear conspiracy was rather forgettable. Still I think the neo seoul, the post apocalyse, and the one with the gay lovers were sufficiently engaging.


As for the link between the stories, my personal take away is that there really isn't much more than the factual connection that was offered in the plot. If you must have a common thread it's probably something like "how people respond to oppression" but I think that's so general it isn't really useful. I just see the episodes as little windows in time across a big time scale, with some factual connections that arise out of history. Which I think presents a nice sense of connectedness to the past and the future through casaulity. I don't think this is particularly deep, but it doesn't have to be deep for you to relish the notion for 3 hours or so.

On March 16 2013 22:21 Jockmcplop wrote:
Do people really get offended when someone says that they don't 'get' a film?
I don't get romantic comedies. For the most part i don't get 80s style action flicks.
Just because i don't get them, doesn't mean i don't understand them, its a completely different thing.

If you don't 'get' a movie, it means it doesn't connect with you, you don't feel what the film-makers want you to get.
So yeah, i would say that you don't get cloud atlas if you didn't enjoy it. For me it has some sort of intangible quality, which alot of the movies that i like seem to have. Its hard to explain, but if you don't get it, its not an insult to you (more an insult to the film makers if anything).

On March 16 2013 23:11 Spekulatius wrote:

I liked the gay lover story.
The postapocalyptic one was just bad sci-fi mixed with a touch of Robinson Crusoe.
The slavery ship story was, well, just another slavery story.
The nuclear conspiracy? Forgettable, I agree. And Halle Berry is a terrible actress.
Neo Seoul was basically anything Orwell, mixed with the likes of Matrix or Tron and Bicentannial man. Nothing that we haven't seen before.
The Cavendish publisher story tried to be funny, really wasn't.

Oppression is a recurring theme. But the movie brought nothing new to the discussion. The view on oppression, slavery, subordination, fight for autonomy and humanity, was just a repetition of something I've read or watched before. And that's not really worth sitting three hours in a cinema imo.

Thanks for responding though, I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything.


It might just be a language thing. I equate "not getting the movie" with "not intellectually understanding a movie". "Feeling" a movie is different from "getting" a movie. I "get" the fun in chick flicks, I just don't "feel" it, meaning I don't feel anything watching most RomComs but I get what people see in it.
You might be right if "getting it" and "understanding it" are two different kinds of things in English. Then again, I don't usually converse in English, so I might just have expressed myself badly :/

On March 16 2013 22:13 levelping wrote:


As for the link between the stories, my personal take away is that there really isn't much more than the factual connection that was offered in the plot. If you must have a common thread it's probably something like "how people respond to oppression" but I think that's so general it isn't really useful. I just see the episodes as little windows in time across a big time scale, with some factual connections that arise out of history. Which I think presents a nice sense of connectedness to the past and the future through casaulity. I don't think this is particularly deep, but it doesn't have to be deep for you to relish the notion for 3 hours or so.

On March 16 2013 23:28 levelping wrote:


If I might be so bold as to suggest, I think your main issue with the film shouldn't really be that oppression is a theme handled before. I think lots of themes have been done before, and so you don't need to really reinvent the wheel insofar as themes go to make a good movie. The recent Lincoln moive for examlpe is all about a struggle for opression and it's a great movie. Personally I also think that Cloud Atlas did it a bit differently in that rather than simply saying Opression Bad! it is more so trying to say that Opression Happens. I don't think it goes so far as to do the usual oppression bad, freedom good. Again, whether oppression is bad, can be overcome or is inherent, is something the movie leaves to you to decide.

I think your main issue is that you don't like the exposition. Which is a fair comment. I would agree that halle berry is not a strong actress. As for the specific plot details, I think that the two future episodes while not perfect, had enough sci-fi things to keep them interesting. The neo seoul design should be commended I think, in the way you "paint" empty rooms with holograms (?) and create food out of thin air. The post apocalyspe suffers from halle berry, but I actually enjoyed the slang/lingo that was used (i'm not sure how the german translation sounded like). For something that is supposed to be the retarded version of english, it was actually very rich in the allusions and imagery.

O yes and the The Cavendish publisher. I actually found that really funny because i'm a sucker for british comedy, and it has tom hanks speaking in a hilarious english accent (again, points that might be lost in a german transaltion). Hugho Weaving in a dress was odd though.

On March 23 2013 16:47 crappen wrote:
10/10 movie. This movie was so beautiful in ways I can not even begin to explain. I cried so hard for reasons I do not even know of.
For the first 2 hours I just opened up to the movie, asking what this is, asking that I would be guided into understanding it. After the scene about the two gays meeting up and starts breaking stuff, my tears they just never stopped, and it was something especially that touched me with just about everything that made tears just go on and on for a good 30 minutes after the movie.

I am just so grateful for this movie

On March 25 2013 15:57 Aerisky wrote:
Whoa, it's really cool to see just how diverse the response can be to a single work. There's just a huge spectrum throughout the thread here in terms of how the movie affected people on a personal level >.<