Cloud Atlas (2012)

When I first heard/saw images from the movie Cloud Atlas I knew that I wanted to see it. The more I read about the movie however the more I came to the conclusion that I should really read the book first. Cloud Atlas, both book and movie are very epic in scope and somewhat complicated in structure, I even read one reviewer state, and I'm paraphrasing, that you basically need to have read the book first as a sort of atlas to help you find your way around the movie. So I read the book.

David Mitchells 2004 novel is an epic, philosophical mediation on a number of subjects, as well as an impressively pulled off exercise at writing in multiple voices, styles and genres', and yet having the six tales that comprise the book be complimentary and add up to a much greater whole. The movie is also quite impressive, the late Roger Ebert called it "one of the most ambitious films ever made", and indeed the film is reminiscent of  the silent epic Intolerance, with its multiple store lines set in different times but all built around the same theme or subject matter, which in this earlier case being 'intolerance.'

A film adaptation of a novel, especially one as epic and multi-layered as this one, is forced to cut, compress, and change things in order to be workable, but the hope is always (or should be always) to stay more or less true to the spirit of the source material, Cloud Atlas the film does this well.  I'd say the film stays about 60% true to the book story wise, with the most faithful segment being The United Kingdom 2012, and the lest faithful probably England and Scotland 1936, which leaves out a major romantic sub-plot and relocates its setting from Belgium to the UK. As part of this necessary compression the films three directors, Tom Tykwer and Lana & Andy Wachowski center there philosophical mediation on the  maxim "only the strong survive" or in this rendering "The weak are meat the strong do eat" as a kind of law of nature that is periodically upended when brave individuals rise above themselves for the sake of others, and that it is this rebellion against the natural order that constitutes the essence of what makes one truly civilized.

This theme is played out through the stories of an American lawyer traveling the South Seas in the mid 19th century, a struggling English composer during the great depression, an investigative reporter in 1970's San Francisco, a sixty-something book publisher in the contemporary UK, a cloned waitress in 22nd century Korea, and a struggling goat herder in the post-apocalyptic ruins of 24th century Hawaii. The film emphasizes the link between these characters and stories as being symbolic of the human condition, or looked at another way as evidence of re-incarnation, by casting largely the same group of actors in multiple stories lines, sometimes under unrecognizable layers of makeup, sometimes playing characters of different genders. So needless to say there is an awful lot going on here in both stories and visuals, and that can no doubt be overwhelming and off putting to some views. I myself have wondered how I would have received this movie had I not read the book first.

These theoretical reservations aside however I think there is an awful lot in this movie to go away impressed, and even moved by. It's extraordinarily well put together, where is its editing Oscar, the main cast's a fine one including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent and Hugo Weaving, though on occasion they can be sort of awkwardly worked into some stories. The sets, visuals, costumes, all show tremendous dedication to detail, and while I have a long standing tradition of acting put off at the Wachowski's all but inevitable (Speed Racer excluded) instance on ostentatiously loading their films with material from a freshman philosophy class, here I thought they were appropriately restrained, you come to the films meaning more or less on your own, they don't club you over the head with it, save lightly at the very end.

All in all a dammed impressive project that shows there is still a lot of freshness and vibrancy available to the film medium, even when its put in the service of mining some of human civilizations oldest questions. ***1/2