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shadda 's review for:
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Having watched the film adaptation, I decided to read the book. A word of warning: the movie changed very little beyond the order in which scenes were shown. The book gives you longer segments of each individual's point of view rather than jumping between narratives every 5 minutes, which gives the overall story a more cyclical feel but makes it harder to see the links between individual narratives.
The movie did change Zachry's story (aka Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in Hawaii) a bit. The novel's version makes the plot tighter but makes the overall tone of the book darker. I won't go into detail, because although it falls in the middle of the novel, it's the end of the movie and I don't want to spoil anything. It's also worth mentioning that the novel only follows a single person through their various iterations unlike the movie where the recurring faces could be interpreted as multiple people bound by some kind of fate to meet again and again across time. Part of the fun of the movie was seeing villains become heroes become bit players and back again across their various lives, but you lose that aspect in the novel.
Overall, a 3, though this probably would have been higher if I'd read the book first. It's just a story that lends itself particularly well to film, so much so that the novel version is disappointing by comparison.
The movie did change Zachry's story (aka Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in Hawaii) a bit. The novel's version makes the plot tighter but makes the overall tone of the book darker. I won't go into detail, because although it falls in the middle of the novel, it's the end of the movie and I don't want to spoil anything. It's also worth mentioning that the novel only follows a single person through their various iterations unlike the movie where the recurring faces could be interpreted as multiple people bound by some kind of fate to meet again and again across time. Part of the fun of the movie was seeing villains become heroes become bit players and back again across their various lives, but you lose that aspect in the novel.
Overall, a 3, though this probably would have been higher if I'd read the book first. It's just a story that lends itself particularly well to film, so much so that the novel version is disappointing by comparison.