addictive storytelling that craves for more

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2014)

Those who love David Mitchell's book would have sworn there is no way of doing his utterly complex narrative justice in a film. But when I watched Cloud Atlas' screen adaptation by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis, I felt hooked instantly and deeply in love with its amazing powers of narrative only paired by its visual playfulness. The film represents the book's spirit in a truthful manner and yet, it is completely different. Maybe that's the secret why it actually is a valid adaptation of Mitchell's insuperable sixfold novel within a novel. The delightfully inquisitive minds of Andy and Lana Wachowski - both notorious visual perfectionists, combined with Tykwer's acknowledged sensibility and great visual talent (remember 'The Perfume'!) have given birth to a motion picture that will still be a cinema classic and venerated, when most much talked-about blockbusters are rotting and forgotten.
The initially dizzying game of multiple role-playing by the same actors turns out to be an act of complete genius once one had the time to get their head around it. To represent the vague idea of transmigration of souls by having the same actors playing the respective roles turns out to be such a clever and effective mean of story-telling, that one has to lift their hat: for the stroke of genius to do this and for the incredible performance each of the main actors delivers in their multiple roles. At this point I would like to commend the awe-inspiring work of those makeup artists working at Cloud Atlas. If anyone, they'd deserve all imaginable awards for their ingenious work of magic.
But back to the film itself: One major difference one notices between film and book is the completely different structure of the story. While the book uses an arch where the story evolves from the oldest chapter to the most advanced into the future and then retrieves its steps in opposite order, the film uses the chance of film editing to combine the six different time periods of the story into a vertiginous cross-looping between each and all of them. This allows the directors to emphasise on the inner relations between characters of the different chapters and to make instant connections to similar aspects of human nature within this complex story. The dizzying order of those snippets of the six interlinked stories force the viewer to put additional attention while allowing them to glimpse moments where all those completely different characters of diverse time periods have similar pursuits and comparable struggles to endure.
Cloud Atlas is a brave adaptation, offering beguiling imagery and a maddening array of interwoven stories. But the most endearing quality of it is and will be the profound message borne out of basic human conflicts: whether you are willing to stand up for human principles no matter the cost and pain to endure, or if you choose the short cut, the easy way, the one that paves humanity's road to ultimate self-extinction.
Finally, what remains after watching the movie is this yearning for more and deeper understanding, for spending more time with those humans on the screen, for savouring those moments when they finally receive some justice or transcend some deeper truth for an instant or more.