Cloud Atlas

Apparently, we’re all connected. Not just now, but for (and through) all time. That’s the premise of David Mitchell’s award-winning novel, Cloud Atlas, and of the movie it inspired. However, the film lacks cohesion, despite the fact that the same actors—including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess and Hugo Weaving—appear in many of the movie’s six distinct stories. A couple of these interconnected chapters have a lot of potential, but the finished product is a mess. A dystopian Neo Seoul of the near future plays the best, which is not surprising given that the film was co-directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). That should have been the whole movie, frankly. Juggling all of it at once, even over nearly three hours, is too cumbersome to enjoy or fully appreciate.