Cloud Atlas (2012)

Rated R

It’s hard to write something short about a movie so long. Three hours of mind-bending, audacious, off-the-map filmmaking.

Here’s the lowdown on the basics: The movie was codirected by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix trilogy) and German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume). It was adapted from an equally complex, enigmatic novel by David Mitchell. The film details six interlocking, yet time-spanning, stories. Ten of the main actors—including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent—play multiple roles (as few as three each, as many as six), which cast them as different races, genders, even synthetic creatures.

A theme of connectedness and reincarnation binds the stories—lovers who face tragedy in one life, might find happiness together in another; sins and hopes of the past ripple through time and sometimes switch places, depending on the era.

While I didn’t follow all of it (no one’s walking out of this with a clear understanding of everything—at least not in a first viewing) I did follow enough to keep me engaged in each of the stories and their characters. For a film with so much going on, I was surprised by how much it cares for its characters. I was left with questions, of course, but felt I got the overall plot and ideas behind each story, even with the constant cutting between them.

I think people who love time-jumping puzzle-plot movies will see this repeatedly, and likely catch something new each time. I think people who don’t like to work too hard in the theater will still say they walked away with favorite scenes vividly recalled because of the beautiful human moments or the striking visuals.

Something’s going on with this film. The directors are reaching to redefine filmmaking, I think. Do they succeed? Time will tell. This movie will be studied and talk about, dismissed and touted as groundbreaking. It’s as if the filmmakers were trying—within theses six mini-films—to encapsulate the whole of human existence, purpose and emotion. It’s trying to document the histories of how we love and create with passion, how we are as cruel as we are forgiving, how we move through time and space while changing those things and ourselves as we go.

This ambitious film might not do well out of the gate (it demands attention and thought), but my guess is, over time, it’s going to be regarded as something of a milestone.

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Side note: Several Asian characters are portrayed by non-Asians actors, which is in keeping with the film’s reincarnation theme that involves actors in multiple roles, but I wonder if it won’t be seen as offensive, particularly since some of the makeup effects could be seen as playing to stereotypes. 

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