CLOUD ATLAS

This film is like an apple pie left in the rain: mushy.  The Wachowskis, of The Matrix fame, and Tom Tykwer, of Run Lola Run fame, bring you an absurdly ambitious film with an absurdly un-ambitious message that being nice is good and being mean is bad.  There are six stories in the film, linked heavily by theme and lightly by plot, which are intercut over three hours:

1) In the 19th century, a young man on an oceanic voyage meets a mean, white doctor and a nice, black stowaway.  2) During the early 20th century, a young composer assists a duplicitous older composer.  3) A reporter in 1970’s California uncovers stupid secrets at a nuclear power plant.  4) The modern day features a felonious London book editor who gets committed to an old folks home.  5) The near future concerns rebelling Korean sex slaves in a glittering high tech hell.  6) The end of time segment features clean actors in dirty clothes speaking Cajun wandering around Hawaii pretending that its the end of the world.

Because of themes of reincarnation and because of production choices, several actors play several different parts in each of the segments.  In other words, you’re going to be seeing Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Hugh Grant, and Jim Broadbent in loads of goofy facial prosthetics.  Actors being cast across gender lines and color lines sounds good in theory but in practice it’s distracting as all hell.  The white actors made to look Korean all have the same dark, empty, shark eyes and when Doona Bae is made up as a white lady, it looks like they just blasted her with the freckle gun.  They didn’t try very hard to make Keith David look Korean, and that’s the best makeup decision in the movie.

The dialogue veers from new-age hokum to purple prose to banal feel-good-isms no matter which time or place the story jumps to, so there isn’t really any surprise or variation.  And did I mention speechifying?  Speechifying to the nth degree! Ye gods, do people ever speechify in this movie.  Everybody is constantly talking about what the movie’s about, big concepts, universal forces, etc.  All that big talk makes small characters seem even smaller.  All these interchangeable, heavily made-up, pretty faces spouting interchangeable mumbo jumbo doesn’t really fill me with hope. Its depressing to think that people have been mulling over the same platitudes for untold centuries.

I don’t usually like films that are ‘inspirational’.  For my money, that’s usually a code word for sappy.  I think people are far more likely to be inspired by something like The Avengers or The Dark Knight, movies that aren’t traditionally considered ‘inspirational’.  I can’t really get inspired by a movie where somebody says ‘My uncle was the scientist, but he believed love is real.’

~ Think of all the character actors that could have been in this thing if they hadn't let the movie stars gobble up six parts each.

~ Hugh Grant is the biggest surprise here, doing fine work in each of his six characters, and being almost unrecognizable in at least one of them.

~ Hugo Weaving plays a weird, green-face Devil in the future segments who definitely deserves a spin-off. 


~ There is one sequence where Jim Sturgess and Ben Whishaw destroy a room full of China that is spectacular.  Mainly because nobody is talking.