Cloud Atlas

At nearly three hours long AND with a strange and difficult to comprehend plot, I can see exactly why "Cloud Atlas" lost a ton of money. In the States, it only brought in about $27,000,000---yet cost $100,000,000 to make. Much of the high cost is undoubtedly due to the cast--as the film boasts some famous and high-paid actors (including Tom Hanks and Halle Berry). It's a shame really, as the film does have some nice thing to offer...though overall, it was a problematic film to watch.

The film consists of many different stories that all occur many different times in history (both in the past and very distant future). And, instead of being told in sequence, they are interlaced throughout the film. Why and what these plots all have to do with each other is something the audience is left to discover or create within themselves. However, many will get frustrated because for some time, the film doesn't give you a lot of clues at to what it all means.

Despite being confusing and hard to grasp, the film has several things I loved. The stars of the film all play multiple roles and you'll see many of them in many stories. This provides the actors a chance to show off their talents--especially because many times they need to effect accents and/or play the opposite gender!! Yes, most of the main cast members play men AND women. Now this never would have worked if the acting was bad and the makeup was bad--but they really shine in this film. I was blown away by the makeup and thought several of the female characters were women when they weren't--it was that convincing. Additionally, while I was a bit cold about the overall film, I did appreciate how novel the movie was--very, very unique.

So how might I have wanted the movie to be instead? Well, the many stories frustrated me because some of them were really, really compelling--and seeing only bits and pieces of them was annoying. I really wanted to see the whole story of many of the stories and could have seen the filmmakers making four or five films instead of just one. I particularly liked the stories about the replicant as well as the one where Hanks played a thug author (his acting was really nice here).

My advice is that this film demands a viewer who is very, very patient, content with ambiguity and who wants to see a nice experimental film-- warts and all. Worth seeing but odd to say the least.

NOTE: Parents, this film is NOT appropriate for kids. It clearly earns its R rating for some extremely graphic violence and sex. While the sex is sometimes steamy, the violence is what troubles me most for anyone crazy enough to let kids watch this one.

"Impressive". That's the best description I could come up with after being asked by my brother and sister-in-law about my thoughts on Cloud Atlas immediately following the film's second-ever public screening we'd just attended. Not a very incisive assessment, I'll grant you, but my head was still spinning as I tried to make sense of what I'd just witnessed over the film's jam-packed two hour and forty three minute running time. This may be one the most ambitious and epic films I've ever seen, demanding rapt attention from viewers as they're taken on an odyssey that spans the globe over 500 years and hopscotches between numerous interwoven story lines that incorporates just about every film genre available, featuring actors playing several different roles each. Cloud Atlas is based on British author David Mitchell's best-selling 2004 novel and was a huge challenge for the filmmakers to adapt and finance (its estimated budget of over $100 million also makes it the most expensive independent film ever made). The architects of this beautifully twisted madness are directors/writers/producers Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and The Matrix's Wachowski siblings, Andy and Lana (Lana was Larry until a gender transition that was completed about five years ago). The Wachowskis, notoriously press shy, were surprisingly on hand (along with Tykwer) to introduce the film's second screening the morning after its star-studded TIFF world premiere on September 8th at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

A movie this expansive should have a massive cast, considering how many characters appear - not so in this case, though. Principle actors Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, and Xun Zhou each take on multiple roles that plays loose and fast with the actors' ages, races, and genders (Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D'Arcy, and Doona Bae also have smaller roles). Having so many dimensions to explore with all of their characters must have been acting nirvana for this lot. For the most part, they pull off the various requirements of the roles, many of which require a significant amount of prosthetics and makeup. Several of the roles were so well disguised that I was completely clueless that a certain actor had played the role until the end credits visually made some of the big reveals (learning that Berry played the white Victorian housewife and Grant a war paint-layered native completely floored me). Sticking around until the end is an absolute necessity for Cloud Atlas - the oohs and ahhs from the sold-out audience as they discovered who actually played some of the parts was a wonderfully unique filmgoing experience for me. For all of the positive aspects that the race bending and gender bending idea brings to the film, there is the faint whiff of novelty attached to it. Things do get a little silly when you have Weaving seemingly playing an Asian character whose makeup produces more of a Vulcan look (which may have been intentional, as it's for a sci-fi sequence that takes place somewhere in the 2300s), as well as in full drag playing a Nurse Ratched-like character. The latter obviously has parallels to Lana Wachowski's own life and although the nurse character provides some decent laughs, I was a little hung up on how it seemed one of the character's main functions was to generate laughs purely based on the surreal sight of Weaving playing one truly ugly looking woman. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

Weaving does provide one of Cloud Atlas' most memorable roles, as the seriously creepy Old Georgie, who terrorizes one of Hanks' many characters. Hanks does some of the best work I've ever seen from him, playing four different characters that range from an unscrupulous doctor in the 1800s to going far against type with maybe the film's standout character, a modern-day thuggish British writer named Dermot Hoggins who gets the ultimate revenge on a critic for a bad review. Berry is excellent with her predominant roles playing an ambitious reporter in 1970s San Francisco and a political figurehead (from what I could grasp) aligned with one of Hanks' characters in the far future, in one of the film's few story lines that doesn't quite work. Also great is Broadbent as both a composer and playing a man tricked into living in a retirement home, who provides the film's best comic relief.

The weighty Cloud Atlas principle themes of philosophy, reincarnation, oppression, and destiny, along with the film's highly challenging pace and complex non-linear storytelling construct will overwhelm many - that's okay, however. I was lost a number of times - not Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy-level lost, mind you, but definitely out of sync with what was happening on screen. This is the type of daring film that demands multiple viewings to completely grasp the filmmakers' grand scope and there's nothing wrong with a little audaciousness from Hollywood once in a while. Even with a big-name cast, it'll be very interesting to see how the otherwise difficult-to-market Cloud Atlas will fare at the box office come late October.

Extremely ambitious film. The way it combines six different stories from different time periods, and here we have different characters as the actors play different roles, a really ambitious, big and expensive project. I can freely say that this is a unique film, truly special, I can understand those who love the film, but also those who do not like it. Although it lasts a full three hours, I was not bored at any point, which is a great thing. The actors did a great job, visually the film is beautiful, and I even like that it requires increased attention while watching. However, I got the impression that there were too many stories and characters and I couldn't connect everything, that is, not everything made sense to me. A lot of it seemed superfluous to me and how the film wouldn't have lost much if some things had been cut. Perhaps this film falls into a special category, and that is that it needs to be watched multiple times in order to be able to understand everything.

I never read the book, but was intrigued by this movie because I had heard the book was very good. I don't have as much time to read as I used to, so I watched it, sort of liked it but found it kind of tedious to get through due to all the jumping around from story to story. Seeing the different actors as different characters was more distracting than anything, and the film was paced too quickly allow the average viewer to pick up all the complexities and themes the author was likely trying to convey.

In the end, I found that it had a couple of good and original story- lines (particularly the Escape from the Nursing home plot, and the gay composer plot was good) but I found the other stories to be of the mostly bland and formulaic sort we've seen many times before (ie. guy finds out slavery is bad, investigative reporter uncovers a plot by an evil corporation, bladerunner/soilent green hybrid plot, and a fairly standard post-apocalyptic adventure story plot). While all of the story lines were entertaining, you never have enough time to become invested in each story or characters because the movie constantly jumped around between the six different plots. Yes, there are six different plots in this two and half hour movie, and therein lies there problem.

After having watched the movie, I looked up the plot of the book because I was curious to see how the author handled the story. According to Wikipedia, In the book:

"Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. The first five stories are interrupted at a key moment. After the sixth story, the other five stories are returned to and closed, in reverse chronological order, and each ends with the main character reading or observing the chronologically previous work in the chain. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the nineteenth century South Pacific. Each story contains a document, movie or tradition that also appears in a previous story. It shows how history not only repeats itself, but also connects to people in all time periods and places."

For the life of me, I can't figure out why the directors didn't structure the movie this way. It would have worked far better. The audience would have been able to become more immersed in each story- line, and the connections between each plot would have been more apparent. As it stands, upon one viewing, it seems more like a mess that tries too hard to be clever. So then you might say "you have to watch it more than once to 'get it'". I don't want to have to watch a film more than once "get it". I paid close attention the first time. I'd rather spend my time doing something other than watching an average movie more than once. It's a sign of poor story telling if you make it so that you have to watch a film more than once in order to "get it".

This film could have been so much better if it was structured like the book and took its time to actually tell the stories and develop the characters. Instead it was paced like an action movie. I felt like I was watching Inception at times (another annoying film that you "had to watch more than once in order to 'get it'"). Perhaps it was structured this way due to a limited running time. But why even attempt to merge six completely different stories into a single movie in the first place? It would lend itself much better to a mini-series. Game of Thrones is the perfect example of a book adaptation that proved to be an immense success when told at a television show's pace. I feel like this movie would have benefited greatly if it was separated episodically like that.

Before you respond to this with elitist statements like: "I got it first watch, you're just too dumb to understand catch all the intricacies," or "the average viewer is a moron, that's why they need all the themes and messages spoon fed to them. This film treats the audience like it has intelligence and allows to viewer to draw their own conclusions." I just want to pre-emptively say "no you're wrong". The reason I think this film was a disappointment was precisely because it treated the audience like morons who just wanted to see fast paced action with no deep exploration of the themes or characters. It didn't give the audience a chance to think about any of the themes because it was too busy rapidly jumping between story-lines focusing more on action scenes rather than any sort character development. Supposedly the Tom Hanks soul goes through a whole redemption arc that I never caught because the film never actually focused on it. I haven't even read the book, yet, on first viewing, it felt like none of the major themes of the book were explored with any sort of depth. It's a shame because it seems like the book is a good one worth reading. I'm probably not going to read it now though since the movie spoiled the plots for me.

That being said, I would say this film is worth a redbox rental at least. It has some good acting and some nice cinematography and special effects. It looks very pretty. The action is also quite good, although I wish there was a little less focus on the action, and more of a focus on the philosophical themes and characters.

I didn't find it to be a mess at all, and it was certainly the best thing the Wachowskis have ever done. I'm not sure how the directing duties were distributed, so I'll uniformly praise Tom Tykwer as well.

I haven't read the book, so I can't make any comparisons there, but I don't often leave a film adaptation wanting to read the novel afterwards, as I did after seeing this.

Visually stunning, epic in scope, a strong score; the sort of film that you're constantly amazed was ever made and happy it was. Equal parts comedy, romance, thriller, and dystopian speculative fiction, it really is an astounding mix of disparate elements.

The biggest overall failure was definitely some of the make-up effects - trying to turn Doona Bae into a believable red-headed Caucasian woman was simply distracting - but the overall art & sound design was incredible.

If I could turn channels while watching TV and switch between stories and narratives as seamlessly and as deftly as the editing in Cloud Atlas, it would honestly be hard to go back to simply watching one show at a time.

Truly a marvel of multitasking on so many levels. Great stuff.