CLOUD ATLAS

Yesterday I went to Erie to have lunch and see the movie “Cloud Atlas”. I came out of the theater awed and sure that Tom Hanks needs the Academy Award for his various roles in the movie. I absolutely loved it and want to see it again to catch all those intricacies and subtleties that I didn’t get the first time through. It was extremely difficult to follow the reincarnated characters through many time periods but was so well acted that you didn’t realize that the movie was almost 3 hours long. Here is a little summary:
Cloud Atlas consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. The first five stories are interrupted at a key moment. After the sixth story, the other five stories are returned to and closed, in reverse chronological order, and each ends with the main character reading or observing the chronologically previous work in the chain. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the nineteenth century South Pacific.


Cloud Atlas explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present and the future. Action, mystery and romance weave dramatically through the story as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution in the distant future. Each member of the ensemble appears in multiple roles as the stories move through time.

Now I can’t wait to read the book.