We’re all connected in some way, past and future.  So says author David Mitchell, and writer/directors Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski.  If you don’t believe this truism, then all you have to do is slog your way through the nearly 3 hour film adaptation of the novel Cloud Atlas.  In the first 15 minutes, in quick succession the filmmakers introduce to us six different stories spanning over 500 years of Earth’s history; stories that seem totally unconnected to one another.  Over the course of the next 150 minutes, the film tries to make them connect.  Some of the connections are obvious and direct, some connect by a slender, and not very relevant thread, while some connections are overly broad and moralizing.  The filmmakers try to strengthen the connections by having the same group of actors playing different roles in some, or all of the stories.  They failed.  The unintended result is sometimes comical, with Hugo Weaving playing an imposing (female) head nurse/warden in an English retirement home, and sometimes preposterous, with Korean actress Doona Bae, with her ill-disguised accent, donning freckles and a strawberry-blonde hairdo, trying to make us believe she is some kind of pre-Civil War southern belle.

As the movie reaches its end, the jumps from story to story become more rapid, promising some sort of great and profound revelation, and then it fizzles.  It was a colossal disappointment for spending three hours of my time.

By the way, I suggest you turn on English subtitles for this DVD.  In the story set farthest in the future, the characters speak in a patois that is almost unintelligible.  I expect theater-goers found this tremendously frustrating.

This movie is available at VPL on Blu-ray and DVD.