Cloud Atlas is a
masterpiece – not the movie, but the award-winning novel by celebrated British
author David Mitchell. Published in 2004 to sensational reviews, the story
sprawls across countries and generations, starting in 1850s New Zealand and
ultimately ending up in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, as well as genres; we get
everything from a pulpy conspiracy thriller to a farcical comedy to a dystopian
science-fiction coming-of-age tale, all seamlessly woven together through the
subtly connected characters and Mitchell’s elegant, versatile prose. If ever a
truly unfilmable book existed, this might be it.
I’m
still not sure whether this attempt by the Wachowskis (the duo behind the
revolutionary sci-fi action flick The
Matrix) and Tom Tykwer (director of the German-language Run Lola Run and the Clive Owen-starring
The International) to bring Mitchell’s
vision to life is more daring or reckless. Certainly, in a time when the movie
industry seems less focused on quality than quantity and even independent
film-makers adhere too closely to predetermined clichés and norms, any project
of this scope and ambition deserves resounding praise for its efforts alone.
Regardless of how the end product turned out, whether it was an awe-inspiring
tour de force or an awe-inspiring catastrophe, people were going to talk about
it, which is more than I can say for the majority of movies that flit into
theaters nowadays.
Unfortunately,
at least in the opinion of this writer (I know there are many people, including
critics, who feel differently), Cloud
Atlas falls into the latter category. Long story short, it’s something of a
mess, devoid of any real sense of direction. Aside from the touching, if
occasionally overdramatic and manipulative score and the grand cinematography,
the movie doesn’t succeed on any tangible level. Even in the grand scheme of botched
book adaptations, it’s pretty disappointing.
On the
most fundamental level, Cloud Atlas
fails because, despite its mind-bending concept, it’s not particularly
engaging. Given the epic nature of the plot, there’s nothing inherently wrong
with the fact that the movie spans nearly three hours; anything less would surely
be inadequate. So the problem lies not with the running time itself but with
how the directors choose to spend that time. While I concede that the innovative,
nested-egg structure of Mitchell’s novel probably wouldn’t work on screen, I
doubt the result would be any worse than what the film-makers actually did,
which is to leap back and forth between the six separate stories as often as
possible with only the most tenuous rhyme or reason. This creates a jarring
sense of whiplash that is enhanced tenfold by the arbitrary editing, which seems
to sever every single tension-filled moment without fail, flinging the
unsuspecting audience into an entirely different time period and country and
interrupting what little flow the meandering plot has. The movie spends so
little time with each individual story that even as someone who adored the
book, I found it impossible to develop even a tentative emotional connection
with the characters, who felt so vivid and alive on page. By the end of the
second hour, I was fighting the urge to glance at my watch, wishing that this
seemingly endless movie could, well, end so I could unleash my long-suppressed
complaints onto the world. Whereas the book had the “what does this all mean?”
hook, among other things, to keep me engrossed and pull me through the slower
parts, the movie just drags on… and on…
Then,
there’s the issue of the casting, which is what prevented me from being teenage-girl-on-prom-night-excited
about the movie in the first place. Surprisingly, aside from Halle Berry, whose
delivery of the line “I know this song. I know I know it” (as featured in the
trailer) still makes me cringe, I didn’t absolutely despise any of the actors, though
I maintain that the majority of them are woefully miscast. On the flip side, I wasn’t exactly impressed by the
acting either. Even the best performances, given by Ben Wishaw as the secretly virtuoso
(and, as the film made sure to point out, gay) composer Robert Frobisher and
Doona Bae as submissive clone-turned-revolutionary leader Sonmi-451, are merely
okay. For all the hype about the actors playing multiple roles, none of them
are given the opportunity to truly shine, a result of both their limited screen
time and the fact that a considerable amount of the dialogue is conveyed
through not-particularly-insightful voiceovers. Then there’s the matter of the now-controversial
race-swapping gimmick, which had very British actors like Jim Sturgess and Hugh
Grant pretending to be Korean. This subject is more fitting for a blog post
than a review, so I won’t go too in-depth, but suffice it to say that this stunt
is both mildly offensive and highly ineffective. When your audience spends more
time trying to guess who is who than paying attention to the story, you know
you are doing something wrong. Plus, for the most part, the make-up is
borderline terrible, especially for the Asian characters (aka the white actors
playing Asian characters), who look more Vulcan than human.
This
last section is reserved for nitpicks – and trust me, I have many nits to pick.
I don’t want to sound like a purist because I will always defend a filmmaker’s right to
diverge from the source material if it proves beneficial, but many of the
alterations made in Cloud Atlas are
either baffling or downright sacrilegious (albeit, in some cases, sadly
predictable). Most glaring is the ending of the Sonmi-451 story, which embodies
everything that is wrong with Hollywood (Cloud
Atlas is technically an independent film, but with its $100 million+
budget, it’s essentially a blockbuster). What should have been a tragically
clever subversion of dystopian conventions instead becomes an utterly generic
tale of romance and martyrdom about as thoughtful as Transformers. Not to mention the fact that the explosion-filled
action sequences that, for some reason, comprise a good deal of the storyline are
painfully chaotic and dull. In the end, if the Wachowskis and Tykwer cared
deeply about Cloud Atlas, either the
book or the movie, it doesn’t show. For such a risky endeavor, the film feels
oddly passionless, workmanlike even. No matter how drastically you modify the
source material’s plot, even if you, say, decide to change an entire plotline
so it fits with your ersatz theme that was absolutely not the point of the book, it’s excusable as long as you 1) stay
true to the spirit of the original and 2) breathe new life into your
adaptation. Cloud Atlas does neither.
It’s all surface and no depth, from the blatant preoccupation with dazzling
visuals at the expense of character development to the too-on-the-nose
monologues about how EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED, in case you didn’t get that from
the posters and trailers and the fact that all
movies with interlocking stories are about connection.
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