I don’t go to movie theatres so I wait for movies to come out on dvd or hbo and yesterday I
saw cloud atlas. The plot is beyond description so I won’t go there so I will be general in nature about
my comments. In my life there have been a few movies, that I saw and they were so good, that
I wish I had written them. Cloud Atlas is one of those movies. There does seem to be some sort of, for
lack of a better word, synchronicity in life. I am busy writing a sequel for my first book and I am sort of stuck
right now and I have found a couple of answers for my writings issues. The first is a book “Philosophy and the modern world”
by albert William Levi written in 1959. He seems to have before the fact has gone down the path I am presently going and
I am finding his questions very close to mine. Almost like he read my mind and is laying out the course. The second
part of synchronicity is the movie Cloud atlas. I see the breath of the movie which reflects on the book and I
see I need a total rewriting of my second book. As for the movie itself, it does touch on themes that I have been working
out for years. It is interesting how seeing something like cloud atlas can move your viewpoint in such a way that you
revisit ideas that you haven’t thought about in years and begin to rework them in new ways. The novel is interesting in
that you can see the reworking of many idea’s into a new format. That is all the “new” thinking does, just rework ideas
that are already there. For seriously, how many truly original ideas are there? Maybe 5 or 6 original ideas in the entire history
of mankind and the rest is simply reworking those 5 or 6 idea’s. I read somewhere that there are only 24 possible plots for
any given work of fiction or play or movie. Everything else is taking from those 24 plots and reworking it.
Not writing today, just thinking. For that is the essence of writing, simply thinking. Writing is the last thing you do
in creating anything. Most of it is just thinking.
I will certainly see the film now, having read a plot summary. It is similar in structure to an old french film "circle of love". Thanks for bringing it up.
So…the title of this thread is somewhat misleading as the OP is emrely about your own novel-writing…which is somewhat disapointing. However, I’m going to speak about the film. It sucked. It was bad. It was about as engrossing as a dead fish. Ok, maybe not entirely, I enjoyed the Sonmi section but the film itself does not work, whatsoever. In fact, it doesn’t work to such a degree that it is one of the very few films that I’ve begun and haven’t finished. Now, before anyone bites my head off for that rant, I have actually read the book. The plot, the technique/method works so much better in text than it does in film format. I think due to the ideas in it, text works better because it gives you an opportunity to ponder it, text is slower to absorb than film. In the film, it’s just too much all over the show. Cutting and chopping left, right, and centre meant I couldn’t get myself involved in it. The experience being akin to a game of musical chairs or something. Not only that, but some of the dialogue definitely requires a bit more time to become familiarised with before you can comprehend it. I’m mostly referring to the character of Zachary here. I just had no idea what he was saying in the film, and this was after I had read the book.So, no. All in all this film was a failure. Not the story, the film, the adaptation.