Cloud Atlas hasn’t exactly come out swinging during its first weekend Stateside. Unless we’re talking at the end of a rope. Arriving behind the growing popularity of Ben Affleck drama Argo and universally beloved animation Hotel Transylvania, it only recouped a meagre $9.4m of its largely independently-financed $100m budget.

The Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s latest mind-fuck (or brain-fart, depending on who you read) will have to garner some serious goodwill fast if it hopes to convince anyone that six roles for Tom Hanks in a single movie is a good thing. It’s already starting to resemble the beautiful corpse left by Darren Aronofsky’s similarly ambitious time-bender The Fountain, which failed to convince anyone that a chrome-domed Hugh Jackman floating around outer space was a good thing.

It would be futile to try and summarise the plot of Cloud Atlas. Adapted from David Mitchell’s popular 2004 novel, it deals with a huge cast of characters, interacting across different eras past, present and future. Suffice to say, the general theme -if it can be called that- is that old chestnut, ‘interconnectedness’.

It would be unfair to pre-judge Cloud Atlas on its mixed reviews and bad box-office (always such a reliable barometer of quality). But given that ‘interconnectedness’ is an incredibly vague and half-baked maxim often used to cloak what many would rather call a big fucking mess, not to mention the overstuffed trailer, Cloud Atlas has more than a whiff of Christmas turkey about it.

UK cinemagoers will have to wait until February to see what all the fuss isn’t about.