Very Important Movie About Evolving Ideas

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2013)

I just watched Cloud Atlas again and now consider it my favorite movie from last year. It's truly a great adaptation of a great novel, turning what is a quite dense and demanding literary work into a supremely entertaining and sprawling movie. The intelligence of the novel is undiminished and its ideas are now so much more accessible.
What is the movie about to me? It is a rhapsody on how the most important job anyone can have is that of a "writer." Great writers, pretty good writers, terrible writers, insightful writers, insanely wrongheaded writers, really anyone who writes is a creator of the new genetic material (memes) that have been directing the evolution of the human species for thousands of years. We evolve very slowly, if at all, biologically. But we evolve at lightning speed, especially now with the Internet, by way of ideas. I placed writer in quotes because the novel/movie considers it quite broadly to encompass oral traditions, musical composers, and even filmmakers along with traditional writers as creators of ideas.
Everything good and everything bad that has come of humanity on Earth so far has been the result of "writers" adding ideas to the great conversation and having those ideas propagate from person to person and generation to generation, sometimes taking on meaning far removed from the author's original intentions. If we wish the future of this great conversation to take more good turns than bad, it is up to all of us to become "good" "writers" in our own ways.
The movie tag-line is: Past. Present. Future. Everything is connected.
But, what is it that connects everything? Richard Dawkins wrote of "bio- morph space" (how all the species connect together and change through time) in his book The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins had previously written about human evolution now occurring primarily through memes (ideas that survive and reproduce) rather than genes. What Cloud Atlas maps and shows as relating all humans throughout history and into the future is idea-morph space, or how all ideas connect together and change through time.
It especially makes two points about the evolution of ideas: 1. That religions evolve from ideas that become texts that become sacred texts, sometimes severed from the very intent and purpose of the earlier texts and ideas (very similar to the movie Zardoz where the sacred religious text of a future society turns out to be a tattered copy of (The Wi)zard (of) Oz.) 2. That the changes in matters of human rights are a perfect example of the evolution of ideas through time with Black History in America and Women's Rights taking center stage. Curiously, LGBT rights are a key element of an early story, but are left unresolved, curious because Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski is one of the key writer/directors of the movie. (Identity is toyed with and questioned continuously throughout the movie though by way of using makeup to have actors play a variety of characters of different ages, races, and even genders.)
You know how it's often said there are no new stories and no new ideas? I think that is largely true. The same ideas recur throughout human history, sometimes coinciding with the zeitgeist and becoming popular, sometimes not. The truly new ideas are like random gene mutations, total accidents maybe, or something out of dreams that just happened to occur at the right place and point in time to survive and spread from person to person and down through the generations instead of being laughed at and forgotten--or crushed because it is a totally inconvenient idea for its time and place.