Cloud Atlas Big Woo

The New York Times has a review this morning of Cloud Atlas, and this paragraph jumped out at me:

The movie insists — repeatedly and didactically — that a thread of creative, sustaining possibility winds its way through all of human history, glimmering even in its darkest hours. A beautiful notion, and possibly true. But unfortunately not quite true-true.

I love that “not quite true-true.”

I’m still curious to see Cloud Atlas. It’s hard for me to resist a film that aspires to be interesting, intellectually, at some level. I liked The Tree of Life, Magnolia, Apocalypse Now, and 2001. It’s how I’m wired. Maybe I’ll like Cloud Atlas for similar reasons. But I’m a bit disoriented by its title. Is it:

• unironically promising the audience a map to the landscapes of change;
• something meaningless pretending to be meaningful (a Daniel Dennett “deepity”); or
• deliberately oxymoronic?

And the actual trailer itself comes off, at least to me, as Green Mile meets Waterworld. But what say you? Hype or ripe?