It seems Hollywood has taken the concept of past and future lives beyond the context of New Age spiritual beliefs and transferred it onto the big screen. In the overly ambitious Cloud Atlas, an epic conglomerate of stories spans 500 years and involves more characters than any reasonable person would care to count. Based on the acclaimed novel by David Mitchell, the genre-bending film involves six different plot lines that intertwine over centuries, which include a post-apocalyptic era and an Orwellian future-scape.
The idea is that every character experiences reincarnations in each period, with every actor playing several roles. If you’ve ever wondered what Tom Hanks would look like with cauliflower ears or what Hugo Weaving would look like in drag, Cloud Atlas serves up the answer on a $100 million plate. The problem is that these admittedly ridiculous costume changes can often distract from the heart of the story, which seems to explore the ways in which we can endure beyond our prescribed time on Earth. The typical epic themes of everlasting love, courage, and triumph in the face of adversity also apply.
The screenplay, written by the directors—the Wachowskis of Matrix fame and Tom Twyker, director of Run Lola Run—is, needless to say, more daunting than most. Dismantling the novel’s straightforward narrative structure, the film breaks down each story into thousands of slices so that it comes across as a quilt of thematically similar scenes. The viewer may be following a stowaway slave sprint across a ship’s mast one moment and an escaped clone dodge bullets on a narrow bridge in a futuristic Korean city the next.
The Wachowskis are certainly no novices when it comes to constructing visually arresting action films, as every frame of Cloud Atlas seems to demonstrate—breathtaking panoramic shots are hardly an endangered species, while the highly demanding production design manages to hit the spot for each and every period.
When the idea for this big screen adaptation was first conceived, many deemed it unfilmable, dismissing the possibility. The Wachowski-Twyker team has clearly risen above these doubts, succeeding in crafting an epic tale that somehow throws romance, mystery, science fiction, action, and even some comic elements all in one incredibly mixed brew.
It is impossible not to laugh at debt fugitive Jim Broadbent’s escape attempts from a retirement home or be compelled by the cliffhanger-filled plot involving muckraking journalist Halle Berry. Some of the best acting, however, comes from the most unexpected places.
While stars like Hanks, Berry, and Hugh Grant deliver rather ho-hum performances, lesser-known actors like Bae Noo-Da and Ben Whishaw rise to the occasion in pleasantly surprising ways. As a “fabricant” clone that manages to start a revolution in an authoritarian cityscape, Noo-Da is particularly striking as she holds together each scene she inhabits with a quiet authority that often escapes even the most practiced of actors. Whishaw is similarly arresting as a bisexual composer gradually churning out a masterpiece that wouldn’t be appreciated until centuries later. Still, it’s difficult to appreciate these golden nuggets when they must so quickly give way to chunks of an entirely different narrative.
As much as I desperately wanted to love Cloud Atlas, I was left with the sense that there was something essential missing from this patchwork of stories. From the opening credits, the viewer is strapped to a rollercoaster ride that leaves little room for investment in each character or any reflection at all. It’s a classic case of style winning over substance, with little more material substance than the changing form of a passing cloud.
