David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was a magnus opus of language, structure, and storytelling albeit without much of a plot. The movie was a bit more scattered but hammered on the theme of connections in ways the book did not. Instead of there being one character that was iterating across time with a single thread connecting each to the next, the movie had many more parallels and appropriately six people that were implied to be versions hopping across time. The future plot lines dropped much of their invented language and, while this makes sense for a movie, I missed it.

The plot element of the 1830s notary’s good need rippling forward in time also isn’t much presented in the book.

Did I like it? Yes. Three hours is a bit on the long side but that breaks down to a little over a TV episode per each of the six time periods. I’m curious what the film would have looked like if it had followed the novel’s structure of ABCDEFEDCBA directly.