"Cloud Atlas": Long Movie, Short Review

So the reason I have been terrible about updating lately is because I've been hella busy all of a sudden, with hardly any time to read or enjoy films, let alone write about them.

This weekend, however, I saw Cloud Atlas in theaters, and I was amazed at how much I enjoyed it--even after reading the lukewarm reviews. Sure, the stories get a little sentimental and dare I say corny at times, and the visuals, while not uninteresting, stick largely to conventional filmmaking techniques,  but it's still engaging, exciting, and has you thinking about it long after the movie is over. Most convincing of all, I really want to read the book now, so the movie succeeds at promoting the book, if anything.

Cloud Atlas is a science fiction and philosophical tale following six interconnected stories and spanning several genres: historical, action, comedy,  drama, dystpoian, and post-apocalyptic. Connections are made with recurring images, the same actor playing different characters, and characters in one story mentioned or appearing in another story. While each story has its own arc, they are woven together to build up collective suspense and a common theme. The movie begins, and ends, with the chronologically final story, implying cyclical life as well as interconnectedness and the butterfly effect (this ain't nothing like that movie, by the way).

The six stories--three in the past, one in the present, and two in the future--are, for the most part, woven well together, each thread related to the one shown before it in some way. While I think the setup was weak initially--I have a hard time remembering why Frobisher decided to work for the aging composer on a whim, or why Ewing had to go see his father-in-law's plantation in the Pacific, for example--the Wachowskis and Tom Twyker cut away from one story to the next at suspenseful moments, and don't wait too long to return to it. I couldn't figure out the connection between the stories at first, but after giving it some thought, you can work out a loose thread, in which Ewing's actions in the chronologically first story ripples across time, and each story affects the next.

While the casting of the same actors in multiple roles makes it more interesting in trying to figure out the connections between the stories and characters, I found this choice on the Wachowskis' part (in the novel, apparently, only a birthmark connects certain characters together) to be confusing and, at times, questionable. Several of the actors play parts in every storyline (looking it up on imdb), but not all of them play consequential roles in each one, nor does the characters that each one plays are necessarily connected to one another. It takes some deliberation, at least, to figure out what the birthmark characters and the same-actor characters have in common.

More troubling is the cross-racial roles some of the actors--mainly, the white, male actors--had to play. Though an entire storyline clearly takes place in a futuristic Korea, Doona Bae, who plays the heroine of this storyline, is also the only Asian actor cast in a speaking role for this storyline. (please correct me if I'm wrong) The other main characters--Hae-Joo Chang, Boardman Mephi, Seer Rhee--are played by actors in "Yellowface." Considering the fact that the same actor, same souls idea doesn't necessarily hold much water upon closer examination, why did they decide to cast almost all white actors in obviously Asian parts? Sure, Doona Bae and Halle Berry play white women in other storylines, but playing white is very different, because there is no shortage of white representation in movies. This is also the one storyline that takes place in a nonwhite country, and almost stereotypically so--the city of Neo Seoul is hyper-technological, heartless, and patriarchical--also does not sit well with me, though that would be more of a critique of the source material than the movie.

I have this to say, though: the costuming and make-up are stupendous in this movie. Tom Hanks' various transformations are particularly striking.

A few more criticisms: while after a while I got the feel of what they were saying in the post-apocalyptic storyline (in which they speak a sort of pidgin English),  it was difficult to understand them at first. There are moment in the other storylines as well, in which the dialogue is difficult to be deciphered--heavy British and Irish accents did not help matters. The film, while awesome and epic, also tends to stick to stories of heroes and villains, even if the hero has to undergo a transformation and not everything is black and white--that is, the movie relies upon tropes we know well.

Overall, I did enjoy the movie, and may indeed read the book eventually. I would give it 3.5 stars out of 5. Oppression score: 4, because even though there were plenty of strong women, homosexual characters, even a story that put old people  as the protagonists, the yellowface thing could have easily been avoided altogether. Definitely a movie to go to the movies to see, though.

A Friend of the Earth is a Friend of Mine--Mostly

TC Boyle's eighth novel, A Friend of the Earth, was released more than a decade ago, at a time when the environmentalist movement was gathering some strength. Recycling programs were becoming mainstream, people cared about the rain forests, and there was a push for greener energy. Capitalists were on the brink of developing "green" products, Whole Foods was rapidly expanding, "organic" was on the rise to become a buzzword and another entry into the free-market lexicon. But for all the progress made since the turn of the century, environmental concerns have taken a back seat to the economy, jobs, and wars overseas. Boyle could see that environmentalists were an extremely vocal but small segment of the American population, and makes the rather grim statement that people will not care so long as they are comfortable--with a twisted, ironic grin.

A Friend of the Earth follows a convicted eco-criminal Tyrone Tierwater across two segments of time: that of the year 2025-26, when the environment in the American Southwest, at least, has rapidly degenerated to deadly monsoons in the winter, and dry desert heat in the summer, and the years 1989-1997, when he was periodically engaged in extreme eco-actions and spending time in jail for them. In both storylines we get a sense of what he was like before and between these periods, and learn a little of the tragic fate of his only daughter, who decided to follow the extremist path.

While the story was interesting enough to keep me reading, I wasn't all on board. The escalation of Ty's grievous actions from mere civil disobedience to assault and kidnapping (of his own daughter) was more mortifying than hilarious, and the grumpy-old-man schtick got on my nerves from time to time. Particularly in the beginning, when his ex-wife Andrea and former friend of his daughter April Wind seem to work against him, to dredge up the past he no loner wants to talk about. I can understand his resentment, I suppose, as it seems to him that all they had done was for nothing, but he seemed to hate April for no good reason--and described her in some pretty racist ways. I know that he is the narrator and therefore his own prejudices that I won't like--but there are ways to do it better. (Exhibit A, always and forever: Lolita) He also made some sweeping generalizations about women that ticked me off--and no, they were not funny, not funny at all. The 2025 storyline improved when April leaves and Ty ends up appreciating his wife and his life a lot more.

The story is supposed to be a dark comedy--and I can certainly attest that there is a grim, farcical vibe throughout the whole story. From Ty being the most famous yet the most pathetic eco-terrorist I have ever heard of, to the enduring willful ignorance of the population in spite of disastrous storms, to the mauling of a pop star by a lion, darkly comic events happen one after another. But for some reason it is either just very difficult for me to do more than a crack a smile at a funny occurrence in a novel, or this book was not very funny at all. Absurd, yes, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious.

A Friend of the Earth is a well-written novel, with plenty of instances with beautiful language and thematic moments, and poses several interesting ideas, but Kurt Vonnegut this is not. Honestly, I think it would have been better as a movie: the visuals would be funnier, and it would get more to the point. Not to mention that the narrative voice and style didn't give us something new--at least not to someone already all-too-familiar with the challenges of the environmentalist movement and old-white-guy perspectives. I give it a 3 out of 5. The oppression score of 3, as well, because there must be worse material out there--and I don't think this is the TC Boyle work that people will be reading in 2025.

Oh, and will there be a perpetual El Nino, depleted Social Security, nil biodiversity, and too many old people? It doesn't look like we'll have all that in 2025, but this year's been a doozy so far, and there's still 13 years to go. Fact can be stranger than fiction.