"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.