Spoilers Ahead: Cloud Atlas

The hotel the wife and I stayed at for her birthday gave us free tickets to the Warren Theatre in the Old Town district of Wichita. Or rather, I paid a little extra to get a "Date Night" package and a pair of tickets were part of the deal. In either case, with it being the weekend before Halloween, the majority of the offerings were horror films; a genre which my wife has negative interest in seeing. That left us with an action-thriller, a biopic, and Cloud Atlas. By the title of this piece, you may have already deduced we chose the latter. I went into it mostly blind, having never read the book and only seeing a teaser trailer and the cast list.

Do you remember reading Catch-22 for [High School/College] lit class? Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings' screen adaptation of Cloud Atlas reminds me a lot of the style of Heller's classic, if not the substance. The focus jumps around at seemingly random intervals, introducing characters in story-lines throughout different points in history. Each of these different time periods seem to be self-contained and cross-referential; such as a young composer in one time period reading the published journal of a young lawyer in another, or an writer's story in one section having a movie adaptation in another.

Let's get the accolades out of the way: it looks amazing. The movie boils down to four period pieces, a dystopian sci-fi piece and a post-apocalyptic piece: even with the three parts that are supposed to be fairly close in time, there are enough differences in the clothing that if you pay attention you can tell which story you're watching by the wardrobe alone. The makeup effects are also amazing, to be expected when each actor is playing multiple parts. The score is wonderful as well, adding to the story rather than distracting from it.

Now, flip the coin. Remember how I said it reminded me of Catch-22? That's not necessarily a good thing. This movie tends to bounce back and forth between its various stories; filling in blanks, and forming new questions in a way that can be not only jarring but downright confusing at times. We never stay on one character or sequence for very long, which is a trick for a movie that clocks in at just under 3 hours.

I really enjoyed the film. I found it thought-provoking and a decent, if not great film. My wife, not so much: she found it a confusing, jumbled mess. It's like someone took six concept albums from the same group and rotated albums between tracks.

Hopefully, when the movie comes out for home viewing, the disc will have an option to show each of the stories separately. There are six enjoyable stories in this movie; and doing it that way will let more people enjoy all of them.