Idea & Info: CLOUD ATLAS

First off, I enjoyed Cloud Atlas, wouldnt even have thought of attempting this, if I wasnt a fan.

I’d take an ambitious failure over a film that plays it safe ANY day of the week.
(looking at you Prometheus)

So… after some simple research, I’ve found out how the novel of Cloud Atlas is structured.

Instead of vertical cutting that forcibly makes you draw conclusions between why Story A cuts to Story B, its presented in a fairly chronological order.

Every Story is told up to its climax, then moves on the the next one chronologically.
By the time we get to the last story, it finishes, then we get all of the climaxes of the rest in reverse chronological order, like a mirror:

1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1

Hopefully this gives the viewer characters we care about and see evolve throughout each of the stories, rather then every 5 minutes playing ‘Guess Who’ on screen.

This sounds ambitious, (though not NEARLY as ambitious as the theatrical cut was IMO), but im giving it a shot.

Hmm.  I was disappointed by the film, I'd give this a watch though.

I always felt that the biggest mistake was to not have the actors with more than one role cast in some sort of logical manner.

Like A is 'the heavy', B is always the romantic interest, C seemed to always have the button, D has the comet birthmark, or some such thing.

Instead I found myself playing 'find the actor under the makeup' and trying to make some association with another timeline that wasn't there.

That's a director's mistake not something an editor can fix though.

Still, restoring the Russian nested doll framework seems like a REALLY good idea.

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