Shallow characters and cumbersome stories

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2012)

The idea of soul mates reincarnating together and interacting through time is explored in Cloud Atlas, a thought-provoking film directed by Tom Twkyer with Andy and Lana Wachowski. Based on the novel of the same name by David Mitchell, the title refers to a musical composition whose notes suggest the movement of clouds across the open skies. In the film version, six connecting stories are interwoven over a span of five centuries, with the same six characters playing different age, gender, and personality roles. Most stories involve a decision a character has to make as to whether to rebel against a powerful oppressor and risk their life, or submit to authority and accept the consequences.
The stories do not always unfold in a linear manner and there is often quick movement back and forth across time which may create an obstacle to some viewer's emotional investment. In the first episode set in 1849, Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess), a lawyer involved in the slave trade, has his life changed when he saves a Moriori man Autua (David Gyasi) from certain death at the hands of Maori's and European conquerors and allows him to become a stowaway aboard the ship. The native man in turn saves Ewing's life when he is poisoned by Dr. Henry Goose (Tom Hanks). In the 1930's, English composer Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), in love with a Cambridge student, Rufus Sixmith (James D'Arcy), is working on a piece called the Cloud Atlas Sextet, when he becomes an assistant to a prominent Belgian composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent). Egotism and greed lead to unwanted consequences for both men.
In San Francisco in 1973, reporter Luisa Ray's (Halle Berry) life is endangered when she becomes involved with the cover-up of a flawed nuclear reactor being proposed by a powerful conglomerate. She must decide if she wants to proceed with the inquiry and risk her life to expose the corruption. In the film's simplest and most entertaining section taking place in present day London, publisher Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) in money trouble hides out at a hotel suggested to him by his brother. The hotel, however, turns out to be a nursing home run by a tyrannical Nurse Noakes (Hugo Weaving in drag) where he is kept prisoner and formulates a plot to escape with his elderly companions.
The film continues in 2144 in Korea, now named Neo Seoul. A clone, Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), serving fast food for twelve years for the Papa Song corporation discovers her true identity aided by Hae-Joo Im and begins to question authority leading to a confrontation and an interrogation. In the final episode set at an unnamed date in the future after "the Fall," Zachry (Tom Hanks) a member of a primitive community who speaks in a new language, must fight off a tribe with painted faces bent on destruction. He is asked for help by Meronym (Halle Berry), a member of a group known as the Prescients, so that she is able to communicate with survivors.
In all of these sections, Cloud Atlas strives to capture the middle ground between an artistic "message film" and a popular entertainment that has broad-based appeal. In straddling the fence, however, it does not truly succeed in either genre and the result has little life. While the film has strong ideas about freedom, love, reincarnation, and the inter-connectedness of all people and lets you know about them – often, its ideas, particularly those of reincarnation and karma, are never fully explored and the characters have no inner life. Didactic pronouncements about the way it is are buried beneath shallow characters and cumbersome stories saturated with excessive comic book violence, murders, suicides, betrayals, and enslavement, none of which fit into a film that explores how love endures throughout time.
The film is not, as Tom Hanks futuristic character put it, the "true true" but the "true false," a film that means to be inspiring but isn't, one that has a spiritual theme but with more special effects and technical wizardry than real spiritual feeling. The truth is not simply a good idea that can be explained, it must be lived in. It is only in the mystery of life and the experience of not knowing that we become aware of the truth, however dimly. According to the Zen saying in Mumonkan 18, "You do not define the truth - you simply enter into it." Cloud Atlas talks about it but stands outside.