Apparently Cloud Atlas was not the easiest film to understand depending on who you talk to. Some people in the general masses thought the same thing when Inception came out, talking about a convoluted plot and whatnot.

Good news to those people! The Chinese censors made sure that Cloud Atlas was cut down from being 169 minutes to 130 minutes. Oh wait that would make the plot more complicated, now wouldn’t it?

Well the three directors -- Andy and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer – were not involved with the re-edit of their film, but they trusted the whatever editing that the film’s Chinese co-producers, Dreams of the Dragon Pictures, would do to the film. According to a report done in the Dongfang Daily, a Shanghai-based paper, the “passionate love scenes” and expository sequences were cut. For example, there is same-sex romance in the film but it was cut because it remains a taboo for Chinese censors. But they made sure to leave gory scenes of people being killed, like being shot in the head.

If they are cutting down a film this much, hopefully they at least try to edit the film in some way to leave the plot making some sense. But cutting about a quarter of the film doesn’t leave much of a cohesive plot.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]