[ed. I'll admit, I've tried reading Cloud Atlas a couple of times and just gave up. Even this review hardly makes it seem less baffling. See also: The Huge, Ridiculous World of 'Cloud Atlas'.]
In our own day a feckless book publisher finds himself trapped in a nursing home. Sometime in the corporate, totalitarian future a member of the genetically engineered serving class, a fast-food worker named Sonmi-451, is drawn into rebellion, while in a still more distant, postapocalyptic, neo-tribal future (where Sonmi is worshiped as a deity), a Hawaiian goatherd. ...
That last one is a little more complicated, involving a devil, marauders on horseback and the possibility of interplanetary travel. It is also where the spoilers dwell. In any case, these half-dozen stories are the components of“Cloud Atlas,” David Mitchell’s wondrous 2004 novel, now lavishly adapted for the screen by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer.
“Cloud Atlas” is a movie about migratory souls and wayward civilizations, loaded with soaring themes and flights of feeling, as vaporous and comprehensive as its title. Big ideas, or at least earnest intellectual conceits, crowd the screen along with suave digital effects and gaudy costumes. Free will battles determinism. Solidarity faces off against domination. Belief in a benevolent cosmic order contends with fidelity to the cruel Darwinian maxim that “the weak are meat the strong do eat.”
Describing this movie, despite its lofty ambitions, can feel like an exercise in number crunching, and watching it is a bit like doing a series of math problems in your head. How do three directors parcel six plots into 172 minutes? (And how much might that cost?) Which actor — most of them inhabit several roles, in some cases changing gender or skin color as well as costume, accent and hairstyle — tackles the widest range of characters? What is the correlation between a musical phrase and a comet-shaped birthmark? How many times does Hugo Weaving sneer?
Maybe the achievement of “Cloud Atlas” should be quantified rather than judged in more conventional, qualitative ways. This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket. It blends farce, suspense, science fiction, melodrama and quite a bit more, not into an approximation of Mr. Mitchell’s graceful and virtuosic pastiche, but rather into an unruly grab bag of styles, effects and emotions held together, just barely, by a combination of outlandish daring and humble sincerity. Together the filmmakers try so hard to give you everything — the secrets of the universe and the human heart; action, laughs and romance; tragedy and mystery — that you may wind up feeling both grateful and disappointed.
by A. O. Scott, NY Times | Read more:
Jay Maidment/Warner Brothers Pictures
