Beau is Afraid was the last one I recall. I think it was mostly the latter half of the movie where I started to get a bit confused and needed the ending explained to me.
What movies made you look up some kind of explanation afterwards? I feel like I have done it several times in the past for more surreal movies but can’t think of any other examples.
It can also be a TV show.
It took me like half the movie to understand the pidgin for New Hawaii.
The book doesn’t jump around. Each story is like a book opened to the halfway point, with another book inserted. They’re all nested like this down to New Hawaii, which plays through straight, before finishing each story in turn.
I love ambitious (if somewhat failed) movies like this, and I’m not really sure if the Wachowskis could have done a better job.
I completely agree with the last sentiment you shared! I think of Cloud Atlas as a flawed gem and am glad to have watched it at least once.
I’ve read the book, and I do think that the choice to not follow the same structure in the movie was the right one. The Wachowskis have always done a lot of their storytelling through the edit, and I think that really shines through in Cloud Atlas.
Absolutely. The metaphor of overlapping books is appropriate for a book, but does nothing for a movie.
The structure in the movie maybe could’ve been clearer, but I think the Wachowskis did better than anyone had any right to. Arranging it as they did allowed them to highlight the parallels in the stories. Anything more sequential could have lost that, and I know for me the parallels were what made me love the movie and seek out the book.