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Cloud Atlas

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Dormin111

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I saw it too. Loved it. :) I found out after I saw it that it was a book originally, so I'll probably want to check that out eventually. A book means you probably get to explore each section in more detail and some things - like, for example, what exactly "the fall" may have been - I'd be interested to hear more about. I'd like to see if my guess about what happened with "the fall" is correct.

One of the things I liked about the movie notably was that I thought they handled "graphic" content well. They didn't shy away from showing relevant parts of the story, but they also didn't spend more time than the story called for on these things either.

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Heh. I watched the trailer when it came out. Here's a transcribed part of it:

"Fear, belief, love - phenomena that determine the course of our lives. These forces begin long before we are born and continue after we perish." Yeah, right.

This one takes the cake, however: "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present." Congratulations, you've extended altruism to the fourth dimension!

I won't be watching this movie despite all of its audiovisual splendor; it's too bad philosophically.

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The movie is about a sort of "butterfly effect" thing. It spans several different time periods and in each case something from the previous time period shown comes into play in the life of the current time period. Sometimes people are reading old letters from the last time period and something they read in them they get some kind of idea from, that sort of thing. That's how the past part comes in. The "fear, belief, love" part is just referring to how there were people before us and there will be people after us and those people too will have these kinds of motivations. As for the present, there's a running theme that is played out differently in each time period shown about how people interact and treat each other and the results of that for better or for worse. It isn't altruistic, people can and do do plenty of things for themselves and this is portrayed as a good thing, it's more just . . . I'm trying to figure out how to put it without getting into too many spoilers . . . other people are there. You live among them. What are you going to do about this? Treating them as just a means to your ends = nay, cooperation (not the same as altruism) = yay and a bit more of the butterfly effect. In every case the characters that are intended by the writers to be heroes are indeed the heroes and likewise nobody is painted as a villain who is doing nothing wrong as far as I can recall. If I am forgetting any places where they aren't properly recognizing who the heroes and villains are, it must have been a pretty darn minor character or I would have remembered.

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ppw, I thought the very same thing when I first saw the trailer. I think the message laid out there was not put well. In the movie it is not presented as:

"Each and everyone of us live in a deterministic world where we are bound by distant forces we can't control."

but rather as:

"Each and everyone of us has the power and efficacy to make such an impact on this world that the effects of our actions will be felt throughout time."

I think it is a profoundly benevolent view of the world.

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I haven't seen the movie, but I finished the book recently. Honestly, I wasn't impressed. It seems to me the entire premise of the book was built around, "What if I wrote a serial where the protagonists of each section had something to do, if even tangentially, with the other sections?" In fact, the author actually points out this premise in the book.

I may not be intellectual enough to understand what he was getting at, but in the end I was left thinking, "Meh, and?"

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I haven't seen the movie, but I finished the book recently. Honestly, I wasn't impressed. It seems to me the entire premise of the book was built around, "What if I wrote a serial where the protagonists of each section had something to do, if even tangentially, with the other sections?" In fact, the author actually points out this premise in the book.

This is exactly what I thought of the movie, actually. The different storylines had only the thinnest connection to one another as far as plot goes. It was like the writers wanted to make it so subtle that the audience would get excited and feel smart when they spotted a connection from one storyline to the next, and as a result they made an effort to integrate them into the plot as little as possible. As a result, it comes out almost as 6 independent stories told at the same time. They weren't even thematically tied together all that well. The theme and structure of the movie was grand in conception, but the filmmakers relied far too much on the audience enjoying the activity of spotting the connections and recognizing the same actors in different roles, and as a result that's where the main mileage of the movie comes from (the same actors in different roles, and figuring out the connections). At the end of the day, there's just not as much there as promised.

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