What's your take on the movie Cloud Atlas?

I saw it when it came out and found it narratively too confusing to hold my interest. Funny, I can scarcely remember much of it now.

My general policy is to never pay for anything with Hugh Grant in it. I’ll wait for it to be shown on HBO…...and skip it then, also….

I haven’t watched the movie. The book I started out liking and ended up disliking the further I got.

The merchants, supposedly the people, created a situation in which hastened the arrival of the end of the world, a type of apocalypse.

They created a utopia, the rest of the people, not counting the acting government were cast out and left, survival of the fittest. Many innocents died or cast out as a sacrfice to their noble cause. That we all must earn our place and right to exist. They did not have the fortune of being labeled worthy. It was ridiculous and to me there was a distinct religious overtone. John Gault was a Jesus figure. Though I was later informed that the writer was an atheist.

I loved it very much. I can easily understand why some people would dislike it though. It’s really a love or hate movie, I think. But yes, I loved it. I thought it was visually beautiful and very entertaining and thought provoking.

I enjoyed the storyline and the inter-connectedness of characters, but I also found the makeup distracting. I can easily notice fake contact lenses and hair coloring on screen and in day-to-day interactions. I did not read the book.

@Unbroken Atlas Shrugged?

I’ve only read the book of Cloud Atlas. In the book, the different stories are nested like Russian dolls. You read the beginning of each in order, and then the end of each in the opposite order. In the ending chapters, there are clever connections between each story. The author said in an interview that the movie had more of a “pointillist” structure, where you see a few minutes of each scene, just enough to move the plot forward.

I really like the premise of casting a small group of actors and having them appear again and again in the different stories. The execution is pretty baffling in some cases. Hugo Weaving looks very strange in some cases. In the book, the story seems to be about the journey of one soul through different reincarnations.

Some of the stories were better than others. The journey through the south Pacific was probably my favorite, because of the unusual setting and the tense plotline. Future Korea was the most fun to read, but it had a lot of recycled ideas from other movies/novels, like Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, and 1984.

I liked Cloud Atlas in the sense that I had fun reading it. But I enjoyed The Years of Rice and Salt so much more. It follows a group of souls through many different lifetimes, starting with the middle ages and ending in the near future. The premise is that most of western Europe was wiped out in the black plague, and how history develops from there. China, India, the Middle East become the main world powers.

The characters are quirky and endearing; you get to know them well and they have strong personalities. That’s something that I felt was missing from “Cloud Atlas.” “Rice and Salt” is mostly about their everyday lives, which are fascinating because of the alternate history angle and the unusual times and places the author writes about. Through their lives, you see sweeping changes in history. There’s a running theme of whether humanity can move past pointless cruelty and rise to its true potential. It’s one of my favorite books.

Lol ok yes sorry I stand corrected.

I really like the movie. It was an ambitious effort in the science fiction arena for films, on par with a novel.

Something you rarely see come out of Hollywood, which panders to the lowest common denominator in the genre – endless apocalyptic stories, just another way to do high tech car crashes and explosions really…

By the way syz, I think the driving force behind true science fiction is not to garner an audience or a fan base, but to present revelatory ideas about the nature of life and human or other societies, how we develop goals, values, technology….

So in a pure respect, Cloud Atlas was not aiming for people to like it, but aiming for people to walk out of the theater thinking differently or more broadly about the potential in their own lives.

(Of course, that’s negating the profit driven model of the film business).

One other point:

Did anyone wonder what planet they ended up on at the end? It could only be one, for several key reasons: Venus.

Mars is too cold – even with terraforming you could not exist outdoors as they did. And they had fusion powered spacecraft, which made fast travel within the inner Solar System possible (maybe a delta V of a million or so) but trips to the outer SS or interstellar travel would still be beyond reach.

Of course, Venus would have had to have been terraformed as well, but there are ways the atmosphere could have bee catalytically changed to make the surface habitable…

Just something that was on my mind at the end of the film…