‘Cloud Atlas’ a visually stunning disappointment

Cloud Atlas is a movie that takes you through six dif­fer­ent sto­ries set in six dif­fer­ent eras. There are many inci­dents that seem to coin­cide as you take a glimpse into each sto­ry­line. The same actors por­tray dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters in each of the peri­ods as they show you how every­thing is con­nected and that his­tory has the ten­dency to repeat itself through­out the ages. Gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, racism, love and courage are always present in our lives no mat­ter how far into the future you look or how far in the past you research.

When I first saw the trailer for “Cloud Atlas,” my body ceased to func­tion and I found myself enam­ored with the screen as the beau­ti­ful images and inter­est­ing sequences unfolded. There was such a mys­tery that sur­rounded what I had just watched that made me want to expe­ri­ence more. As a huge fan of “The Matrix Tril­ogy,” my hopes were set very high for a movie which I had only seen a tiny abridge­ment. The thought of our lives being con­nected and even influ­enced by dif­fer­ent incar­na­tions of our­selves through­out his­tory was an absorb­ing idea that had me yearn­ing for more.

The famed, Wachowski Broth­ers adapted “Cloud Atlas” from a novel by the same name writ­ten by, David Mitchell. Hav­ing not read this work myself, I have to imag­ine that “the book was bet­ter.” You, the viewer, are led through the six dif­fer­ent time­lines after being given just a brief minute’s glance of each story. It will take the first two hours of the movie for you to real­ize what is going on and that the sto­ries share some sim­i­lar­i­ties. It becomes appar­ent that each indi­vid­ual story is con­nected or influ­enced by another as you are coaxed into real­iz­ing that his­tory repeats itself. A fine mes­sage, but you almost feel a despon­dent loss of hope for human­ity as you have just wit­nessed the same events come to fruition from sev­eral points of view. The begin­ning is the end is the begin­ning as we see that many years into the future our descen­dents are all going to suf­fer sim­i­lar fates.

I found it hard to con­nect with any of the char­ac­ters. You are only shown a small win­dow of each time­line per scene, which I feel made it hard to really fol­low them. Espe­cially since the same actor/actress is in the next scene, but in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent out­fit and era. There are many films that have suc­cess­fully told a story out of sequence (“Pulp Fic­tion,” “Memento”) where it actu­ally adds to the story. “Cloud Atlas” was not one of the ones that I feel pulled it off very well. There were sev­eral instances where it was imper­a­tive to the plot devel­op­ment, but being pulled from one time­line to the other felt unnec­es­sary at times. There were sequences that felt vital to the plot, but as soon as you were into the scene and able to catch up with what was going on you were jerked into another story that may or may not have any­thing to do with what you were just expe­ri­enc­ing. This made it very hard to sym­pa­thize with the char­ac­ters. You just need more time to con­nect with them on a per­sonal level in order to care what hap­pens to them.

If you look back to any his­tor­i­cal source, you see that human dia­logue has under­gone tremen­dous changes. “Thou art” has become “you are” and in some parts of this great land that speaks the same lan­guage it can even be “y’all are.” Every lan­guage has dif­fer­ent dialects based on his­tory and region. Under­stand­ably, there are sev­eral time­lines tak­ing part in sev­eral parts of the world in this movie. The prob­lem is that you spend too much time try­ing to fig­ure out what peo­ple are say­ing when they speak. This is espe­cially “true-true” in the post-apocalyptic land that has us liv­ing like cave­men once again where the char­ac­ters have reverted to a very child­like ver­sion of bro­ken. The con­fab in “Cloud Atlas” is extremely hard to com­pre­hend. Sub­ti­tles would have done won­ders for this movie. The direc­tors also spend a lot of time hyp­ing up cer­tain aspects of the film by plac­ing an immense amount of impor­tance on cer­tain items and events, but then just drop it as if there was noth­ing impor­tant about it in the first place.

There was one sto­ry­line in “Cloud Atlas” that may have been the only redeem­ing qual­ity to the whole deba­cle. There is one that involves a group of senior cit­i­zens and a lot of shenani­gans includ­ing a senior cit­i­zen home escape and a bar fight. This story was also the most removed from the other plot­lines, as it seemed to stand on its own and not be inter­twined with the oth­ers. Not redeem­ing enough to make me ever want to see this movie again, but mildly enter­tain­ing at best. I con­sider myself a very open minded viewer, but this one closed some doors for me.

Posted by Scott Hall on Oct 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.