Just watched Cloud Atlas and loved it. I’m not going to say it was better than the book. First of all, because it’s sacrilege, a writer should never say that a film was better than the book. Second, the book was a long book and, I’m sure, had a lot of substance and deep thoughts and, I’m not sure , maybe there was a whole time line left out, its been a while since I read it.
But, the film was brilliant. The scenes were awesome, from Neo-Seoul to Tom Hanks’ island, and it was in a special category for me of films that are from books, and where I also place The Lord of the Rings and Bladerunner. This is the subcategory of films which were good to watch because they were a hell of a lot easier to understand than the books they are based on. Lord of the Rings would carry on with the backstories of families till it was as tiresome as the begats in the Bible, and after a point you just can’t remember who is who any more. The films were action galore, the good guys and bad guys were clearly delineated, and you never had the feeling you needed to back up a couple of chapters and read that again, just to know what was going on. And Philip K. Dick, with the way he went on and on with the future’s obsession with fake animals, well, that was just as well left out of the movie. That just would have detracted from Harrison Ford duking it out with a bunch of robots.
Certainly I understood the time line with the AI, and the timeline with the investigative reporter v. the crooked nuclear power plant, much better in the film.
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