Cloud Atlas isn’t a very good movie.
Let’s just make that clear from the start. Sloppily executed, despite the
Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s obviously sincere efforts, it’s a cloying,
bizarre, epic mess that aims for the stars without ever managing to get off the
ground. There were a couple of bright spots, to be fair – namely, the lovely
score and a couple of performances, though those were mostly too limited in
screen time to be fully appreciated – but they did little to compensate for the
film’s abundant flaws. Plus, no matter how much those involved try to justify
it by saying the movie was about transcending race and that it was a necessary
and understandable decision from an artistic standpoint (it really wasn’t), the
use of yellowface in Cloud Atlas is depressing
and offensive, made worse by how poorly and lazily it was done. Moreover,
you know that we’d all be rightfully up-in-arms and that no one would be
writing articles like this
if they’d used blackface, which is probably why the filmmakers didn’t attempt
it.
Jim Sturgess, you’re a terrific actor, but just…no.
All of this is to say that I
could write an entire blog post about my issues with Cloud Atlas (or you can just read my fellow blogger WordMaster’s review,
which sums them all up pretty accurately), or even one focused solely on why
its use of yellowface is so problematic, but right now, I’m here to explain why
this is exactly the kind of movie we as an audience should demand more of.
I don’t think anyone was
particularly shocked to see Cloud Atlas
land with a whisper at the box office when it debuted this past weekend, given
the complex nature of its storyline coupled with a 3-hour running time. With a
budget at $100 million, it’s one of the most expensive independent movies ever
made, making
its $9.4 million gross all the more dismal. Though I didn’t think the movie
was very good, and its difficulties in attracting an audience are completely
unsurprising, this is a bit of a shame, because you know a bunch of studio
executives are labeling it as more proof that moviegoers don’t want
complicated, risk-taking fare.
Whatever you think of the end
product, Cloud Atlas is undeniably
one of the most ambitious movies to grace theaters in a good long time. Do a
quick Google News search of the film, and pretty much every article you find
will have that word buried somewhere. Hopping around the world with a sprawling
cast of characters (the actual cast is a bit smaller since nearly all of the
central actors play multiple roles) as it crosses genres and time periods while
touching on a number of philosophical ideas, it’s the kind of movie that generates
a lot of discussion, at least among those few who actually saw it, and
polarizes people into “love it” or “hate it” camps. Had it been better
executed, it could’ve been a masterpiece; to those in the
“love it” camp, it already is.
Now, this isn’t technically an
original movie, since the material comes from the masterful (and, in my
opinion, vastly superior) 2004 novel by David Mitchell, but considering that
the book has been often deemed un-filmable, it’s certainly a bold, daring
cinematic venture, the sort that comes around no more than a couple of times
each decade. Darren Aronofsky’s The
Fountain is perhaps the closest comparison, and even that, at least from
what I can tell as someone who hasn’t yet seen the movie, doesn’t look like
nearly as demanding and intricate a task; after all, it only incorporates three
separate storylines, whereas Cloud Atlas boasts
a half-dozen. The Wachowski siblings and Tykwer deserve some commendation for
even making the attempt at all, regardless of whether you think their gamble
paid off.
Unfortunately, I doubt Hollywood
is going to see it that way. Yes, I understand that it’s a business, and from
an economic standpoint, maybe you can’t really fault studios and investors for
skipping over such high-risk/most-likely-low-reward projects like Cloud Atlas that don’t have a clearly
defined, pre-established audience in favor of more conventional options.
However, from an artistic perspective, the industry’s reluctance to support
fresh, unique filmmaking is as frustrating and tiresome as all the complaining
about that reluctance.
As anyone who’s read this blog on a regular basis can probably tell, I
love a good blockbuster as much as anything, and I think there are a lot more
of them than all the bitching naysayers would like to believe, but lately, I’ve
started to crawl towards some sort of critical mass overload on my tolerance
for the usual parade of sequels, reboots, remakes and board/videogame adaptations.
Every so often, we’ll get a hit film that will somehow challenge Hollywood’s
preconceived notions of what can be successful, movies like Inception and Avatar (people will watch movies not based on pre-existing material
too!) or, even though I wasn’t the biggest fan, Bridesmaids (female-driven movies can also make money!). Ultimately,
these movies are mostly treated as flukes and rarely start any significant
trends – at least not the trends you’d hope for. Instead of spawning studio
interest in more original material for blockbusters, Inception and Avatar
mostly just gave us, respectively, a marketing obsession with putting BWHAAAM foghorns in every single trailer
and the ongoing 3D craze. Likewise, while Bridesmaids
has launched a new trend of R-rated
comedies aimed
toward women, no one seems to have realized that viewers liked Kirsten
Wiig’s film not
because of the crass vulgarity and sex jokes, but because it featured a
supremely talented cast, well-rounded and relatable characters and a story that
the filmmakers and writers had obviously put some actual thought into.
By the same token, just as movies that stray from the formula and manage
to become hits are treated as random strokes of good luck, when a film that’s
expected to be a huge blockbuster bombs, studios typically seem to dismiss it
as a victim of misfortune or circumstance, not as red flags signaling that
perhaps they should reexamine industry conventions. For instance, when the
family board game-based behemoth Battleship
tanked spectacularly this past summer, Hollywood wrote it up as the unfortunate
side-effect of The Avengers’ box
office dominance at the time, which, granted, was likely a significant
contributing factor to Battleship’s
failure to bring in an audience. The point is that, rather than paying any
attention to the
real lessons to be learned here, studios blamed it on outside variables
unrelated to the movie itself so that they could maintain the status quo. As
further proof of this, not only have these geniuses failed to realize that
maybe people aren’t too interested in movies based on board games or blatant
cash grabs reeking of corporate excess, but they decided the proper thing to do
was to green-light even
more of them.
‘Cause when I look at the movies showing at my local
theater, I think,
“You know what we really
need? A Candy Land movie starring fucking
Adam Sandler.”
Of course, this isn’t to say
that every film that flops should be deemed an irredeemable disaster that
should be held as a cautionary tale for future generations until the end of
time, or that every surprise hit ought to be treated as a glittering beacon of
hope, a bible from which we can glean the secrets to making quality, sure-fire
successes. In fact, the very opposite is frequently true, with great movies
sometimes failing to find an audience and not-so-good ones somehow exploding
into the zeitgeist (see: Blade Runner
for the former, Paranormal Activity
for the latter). The truth is that a movie’s financial success often has little
to do with how good or bad it is, because if it were that simple, we’d all
probably be a lot happier with Hollywood and Fright
Night would’ve been the nice sleeper hit it
deserved to be. However, because Hollywood is a business, it
doesn’t matter whether a film earned
its box office intake, only whether or not that intake is enough to produce a
profit.
Now, bringing this discussion
back to Cloud Atlas. The problem with
elaborate, complex ventures like this is that they tend to cost shitloads of
money to make, not to mention to advertise and sell, and more often than not,
they’re unable to bring in that much revenue in return. Like Cloud Atlas, the aforementioned The Fountain barely made a dent at the
box office, ending up with a $10.1 million gross in
the U.S. that was meager even for its relatively modest $35 million
production budget. Cinematic history is littered with ambitious passion
projects that turned into financial catastrophes, from the infamous Ishtar and 1963’s Cleopatra (which was actually the highest
grossing film that year but was so expensive to make that it still took a loss)
to Waterworld and Gigli. A lot of these movies are
genuinely pretty bad and probably shouldn’t have been made at all, let alone
for such extravagant sums of money, but occasionally, it pays off and you get a
Titanic or Inception, instead of a John
Carter. The movie industry is at its best when studios and filmmakers are
willing to take financial and especially artistic and intellectual risks; if
everyone played it safe for fear of not making a profit or because they didn’t
think audiences would “get it”, we probably wouldn’t have works like Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse
Now or even The Lord of the Rings
trilogy.
You could point to a variety of
reasons for why Cloud Atlas flopped:
the threat of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast; the book, which is acclaimed
in literary circles and technically a bestseller but hardly has the same cachet
with mainstream audiences as, say, The
Help; long but not particularly informative or enlightening trailers; the
diminishing star power of Tom Hanks and Halle Berry; or even the controversy
over its racial politics. However, its failure doesn’t mean audiences don’t want
to see ambitious, intellectually challenging fare. It would be a shame if
filmmakers let high-profile disappointments like this or any of the
aforementioned films discourage them from creating movies that strive to do
more than just serve as a trivial two-hour diversion, that take risks and push
boundaries. After all, I’d much rather watch an interesting, creative
head-scratcher like Cloud Atlas than
a Twilight reboot/sequel/spinoff/whatever the hell they’re
planning on doing or more
Star Wars films. All of them are
going to cost money, so why not, every once in a while, spend it on a project
that’s at least attempting to do something different?
Cloud Atlas was a mess, but I wish we could see more messes like
it.
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