It's kind of hard to explain Cloud Atlas.
Cloud Atlas was based off a book of the same name that is not just one story but 6 spanning across centuries. One takes place in the 19th century, one in the 30's, one in the 70's, one in 2012, one in the future, and one in a farther post apocalyptic future.
I wish I could explain each story in detail but that would take forever. A better way to do that would be to explain the novelty to characters of this movie.
Now this movie is directed by The Wachowskis.
They of course did The Matrix and its sequels. Now I loved the Matrix. I liked its sequels but I realize the problems that are in those movies, especially when they tried to make the movies too philosophical and sacrificed common sense in story telling.
But back to Cloud Atlas, the movie focuses on the interconnectivity of lives. They further this idea, by having multiple actors across centuries being played by a small group of actors. Now I'm not incredibly certain if each character is a reincarnated version of themselves between time periods. Like if Tom Hanks character in the post apocalyptic future is the reincarnated version of the character he played in the 19th century. The chart above is an interesting theory of the characters going through the spectrum of evil to good throughout their lives, but this would only make sense if their characters were connected throughout the time periods.
The reason this theory is contested is due to the fact that some characters have a same birthmark. But are those people the same characters? I don't know.
As far as individual performances go, there was really nobody that was bad in this movie. Tom Hanks of course was phenomenal, Halle Berry was great. For the most part, the actors playing these parts wasn't the problem. The problem was actually with the few characters that they wanted to make different ethnicities.
The biggest example of this is the Neo Seoul. The one of the only actresses of Asian decent is Zhou Xun and its a good thing that she is the prime character in that storyline. But then they try and make Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, and even Halle Berry all Asian... it doesn't work.
I talked about this in my Doctor Who The Time of the Doctor review. They did a much better job making Matt Smith look incredibly old than they do making Halle Berry look white.
If you can't tell I didn't really like this
But putting aside the crappy prosthetics, I did like the multiple characters/ one actor approach. A little confusing, yes, but isn't that the point of a movie where you need to think.
And that's the other part about this movie that was a little... "eh" for me.
The length.
This was a long movie! Really long!
Now I don't mind a long movie, hell I'll have whole days where I'll sit down and watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy and each one of those movies are 3-4 hours long depending on if you watch the extended versions.
But in order for me to enjoy a long movie, I need really be invested in the movie. I need to really want to sit down and watch this movie for 3 hours.
And that's not always the case for Cloud Atlas. I wanted to watch this movie several times before I finally did. Every time I thought about putting it in, I remembered how long of a movie it was and how slow it can get, especially the beginning.
In short, the movie didn't need to be 3 hours long. There are a couple scenes that seeing now really didn't need to be in the movie. Maybe do what Lord of the Rings did, have those not totally necessary scenes in an extended version.
I don't know, each time I watch this movie I just get fatigued by the length and maybe I'm missing some intricate details. But I know that both times I've watched this movie its happened. This becomes a problem because the movie is a movie that requires a lot of thought, and multiple watchings. If I'm going to watch this multiple times I'm going to have to watch to watch this multiple times.
Fortunately, the length doesn't take away from the creativeness of the plot and the fascinating concepts it brings.
The last thing is the post apocalyptic future.
Tom Hanks and Halle Berry star in the farthest time period. Tom Hank's character is apart of a native tribe and with passing time, accents get mixed and contorted but its bad.
The first time I watched this movie I was in a lecture room with poor sound quality. I couldn't make out anything they were saying then. It made the first viewing I had really hard.
The second time I watched the movie, I did understand it a little bit better but it was still pretty jumbled and confusing.
It's not a huge thing if you can slightly understand it, its just something you need to understand if you're going to watch this movie, these parts will be hard to understand at times. Which is a shame because Tom Hanks character in that period is very intriguing and complex. Watching it a second time I know see the struggle of that character and I really enjoy that storyline.
I have the book and its taken a while for me to really get into it. Eventually I do want to read the entire book and see which is better. If I do, I'll be sure to do a review of the book as well.
Until then, know that Cloud Atlas is a movie worth checking out. Yes, it has its flaws, its very long, and some of the characters these actors play are not depicted that well.
The movie is a risk, I'll say that. And it did an alright job at it. I won't say its ground breaking and brilliant but it is creative. Its something different and worth giving a watch.
So that's what I thought of Cloud Atlas. Have you seen Cloud Atlas? Lets discuss it below in the comments.
I'll leave you with this. I'm not a huge fan of the Wachowskis. They kind of come off to me as pompous and believe they're creative geniuses. I'll leave it up to you to debate if they are or not but here's their explanation of how Cloud Atlas came to be and I'll let you be the judge of if this is just them being excited about their creativity or over confidence that they can make something "groundbreaking"
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