Why was "Cloud Atlas" so poorly received?

I have only belatedly got round to reading the book (you can read what I thought of it here) and then watching the film, and I really don’t understand why the film has been so poorly rated – 66% on RT and 7.4/10 on IMDB, and it didn’t even make money at the box office. I am glad to see though that the great Roger Ebert gave it 4/4, and I’m with him: it’s a great film, a tremendous adaption of the book, with some wonderful acting – with most actors playing multiple parts.Other than the structure it was a faithful transposition of the book, and I think re-working the structure as they did made sense for the film (in fact, I even wonder if the book might not have benefitted from a similar approach... maybe, maybe not, but that’s another argument). Doing it the way they did made it easier to see the deliberately tenuous connections between the stores, and having the actors playing multiple parts across them all worked well for this too.And I really enjoyed it – which must surely the primary goal of just about any work of art. via /r/movies https://ift.tt/3uUeANw