I watched the movie Cloud Atlas tonight with my son and some friends. It was 3 hours long and told 6 different stories at once. I spent the first half of the movie interested, but a little annoyed that I couldn’t keep all the stories and characters straight. By the second half, I recognized the story threads clearly but I was still confused about which characters were connected between stories and how. It didn’t help that the same actors cropped up in each story with wildly different makeup and occasionally even a different gender. Sometimes I found a connection between the characters played by the same actor and sometimes I didn’t.

At the end of the movie, I wasn’t entirely unsatisfied, but I wish I understood the connections between the stories better. I feel like I missed out on an “aha” moment somewhere along the way.

That said, I really liked a lot of the settings, and the stories themselves. I got the sense of an overall theme about stepping outside your culture’s boundaries to help another person which appealed to me. I ate up the futuristic Neo Seoul city and technology too.

It wasn’t until I came home and read about the plot online that I really understood what was happening. The following statement from the Cloud Atlas (novel) page on Wikipedia summed it up nicely for me. I guess it could be considered a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll give you some warning. Don’t read any further unless you want a brief explanation of the overall plot.
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“Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next.”

I also have to mention that after comparing the plot descriptions of both the novel and the movie, the nested structure of the novel makes a lot more sense to me. In the novel, the significance of the media passed between generations seems more clear and actually drives the narrative, creating the reasons for jumping between stories in the first place.