(Forward: I've been planning this review for a very long time now. I was very excited when the film came in the mail today.)

If a film is good, I'll usually think about it for a day or two before moving on. If it's great, I'l think about it for weeks. But to think about a film almost every day for nearly six months after I've first seen it? That takes a miracle.

And Cloud Atlas is that miracle.

Now, since I believe that the Academy should be subject to criminal abuse for disregarding Cloud Atlas, I shall now list every Oscar category that the film was eligible for and give reasons why it should have been a frontrunner at…

"What is an ocean, but a multitude of drops?" - Adam Ewing

I think the only sensible way to review this film is by each of it's inter-twining stories. In chronological order, of course:

PHASE ONE
Time and setting: South Pacific Ocean, 1849
Genre: Sea-faring adventure/period drama
Protagonist: Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess)
Well, I suppose a good place to start is the worst place to start, because things can only get better. Although the events of this section are meant to be small and cramped to show the gravity of the events that are to follow, this doesn't seem to gel with the rest of the story. The other stories have a bigger scope, while nothing much happens in this…

Having read the book only after seeing the trailer a few months ago, I was never in the camp that thought the book should/could never be turned into a film. I read the book with an almost insurmountable amount of hype behind it, but it met those expectations handily. The film has been hyped even more than the book, with good reason! The book is epic and dramatic, spanning vast amounts of time and space. Even though it has one of the most interesting and impressive narrative structures of all time, the narrative is secondary in importance to the themes holding the disparate characters and circumstances together. How do you turn such a book into a movie without failing miserably?…

David Mitchell’s novel is one of the most impressive novels I have ever read. It is an exercise in style, an exploration of the nature of humanity and a narrative of hope, an appreciation of art and a glimmer of redemption for a self-destructive race. That is what I got out of it, but the book is so complex that multiple interpretations are possible and there is always the chance that people will not take anything from it at all. That’s the nature of any form of art. Where the film fails to be a successful adaption of the novel on that deeper level for me, it more than succeeds in distilling a common thread from it, structuring the complex…

Cloud Atlas is a mess. That's the short truth of it. But what a big beautiful mess it is. As many flaws as there are in this film, I couldn't help but get wrapped up in how gorgeously unique this film was. Sitting there in a dark theater with a couple of friends and a small crowd, I just got enraptured by the whole thing. "How does this film even exist?" I thought to myself multiple times during the course of the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer's 3 hour epic.

I guess that's my biggest praise I can heap onto the film. I really have never seen a film like this in my life. While these stories aren't very original at…

Both challenging and accessible, original and recognizable, "Cloud Atlas" in an achievement that is both wide in scope and deep in theme. Taking six disparate stories and blending them into one rich and fast moving narrative, the film is a tale of love, interconnectivity, and, most of all, life.

With lush design and engrossing cinematography, "Cloud Atlas" is marvelous looking. Its editing is sharp, remarkably keeping dramatic tension tight as the film bounces from tale to tale and back again. The cast, taking on multiple, sometimes unrecognizable roles, is uniformly sound. Tom Hanks and company communicate the pathos necessary to connect at multiple levels with the audience.

The Wachowski siblings and Tom Twyker have molded a film that is sweeping,…

I think this was one of the most divisive films of 2012; I also think it's easily the most ambitious, and successfully so. Having now seen Cloud Atlas a second time, I can safely say that I'm looking forward to watching it quite a few more times. I can also say that I may have to make room for it on my Top Ten list of last year (I'm ashamed to say I bumped it off when first making that list). Considering that not only is this movie nearly 3 hours, but it's also comprised of six different stories spanning a great deal of centuries which alternate between each other as the movie progresses, there's never a dull moment. This…

After reading the book before I saw the movie I had a rather good idea of what was to come in it and enjoyed and left the theater thinking it was a hell of am ambitious film but I didn't think that it was one of the best films I had seen but much like good movies do, they stay with you and make you think and ponder about things and so from October until today that movie has stayed with me and made want to watch it again to take in all the beauty of the world that was created. This is one film hat I feel the critics were wrong about because this film will stand the test…