Clever... Ambitious... Entertaining... Epic...

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2013)

So here is a movie that has everything: gore, sci-fi, violence, drama, action and huge visual effects Yet it's very telling that when it came out in the US it flopped. Big-time. There were lots of walkouts because it was 'too hard to follow' for some and 'too boring' for others. For a generation weaned on endless Michael Bay helmed Transformers toys advertisements – sorry: movies - or regurgitated Spider-Man remakes/reboots/prequels/sequels/who-the-hell-cares, Cloud Atlas committed the ultimate sin: it was a movie that strayed from accepted convention, playing out multiple story lines that seemed unconnected over a huge ass-numbing running time. Punters voted the only way they knew how: with their pockets. Simply put, they stayed away in droves.
And who could blame them? After all, it wasn't a reboot; it had no fighting robots and featured no vampires. However, this is exactly what makes the reception to the film all the more telling because - get this - Cloud Atlas is an exceptionally brilliant movie. Even more tellingly, it's (A) Easy to follow – the stories are surprisingly simplistic - and (B) not boring at all – the movie, in fact, moves at a very fast pace. It's very telling that even after you take those aspects into account, it still managed to go over US audiences' heads. So what was the problem, if any? It seems Cloud Atlas's biggest sin was it attempted to be bold, ambitious and original - probably not the kind of thing that would go down too well with an audience waiting for the latest Marvel rehash.
Based on the novel by David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas tells the somewhat fanciful stories of people and events that while happening far apart from each other – mostly in other times - are intricately linked beyond time/space. It may sound unwieldy at first but it works: a lawyer (Jim Sturgess) on an ocean voyage is being slowly poisoned by his greedy doctor (a brilliant Tom Hanks); a sassy journalist (Halle Berry in top form) is investigating some nefarious matters concerning a nuclear plant; a revolt by robots (fabricants) in a futuristic Korea is being suppressed by authorities; some senior shenanigans goings-on at an old folks' home where a literary agent is sequestered; there's post- apocalyptic bloodletting in an age many centuries from now and finally, two composers war over a piece of music which they're claiming equal ownership of – the 'Cloud Atlas' sextet of the title.
While this may sound like a storyline that is has too much going on for its own good with its 'everything but the kitchen sink thrown in' approach, it still works and there is a reason for it. If there is one thing that has been overlooked with Cloud Atlas it has to be the remarkable feat of editing. Surely, this has to be one of the best edited movies in years? Editor Alexander Berner has no fewer than six stories to juggle, which in lesser hands, could have been a huge 'throw it at the wall and see what sticks' mess, but in Berner's hands, the stories are inter-weaved and played out to perfection. There's a lot of ground to cover here. When juggling that amount of stories, the editor has to have the precision of a surgeon. It's a balancing act for sure: when do you cut away? When do you return to a story? When do you introduce a new story? When do you cut away from that and go to the next strand? And so on. It was a massive - nay, typical - oversight on behalf of the Academy that it wasn't even nominated.
The cast are great too and play multiple roles across the vast layers of stories: Tom Hanks doing the best Irish?/British?/Scottish? accent this side of Dick Van Dyke and Halle Berry playing a white woman that resembles Madonna back in her 'Vogue' days; Jim Sturgess playing an Asian (with a distinct Neo-vibe from The Matrix) and Hugo Weaving playing a chilling demonic entity - there is no-one dragging their weight here; everyone is giving it one-hundred per cent. While some have sniffed at the notion of white people playing other races, it's important to point out that blacks and Asians also play whites in this movie. In fact, there's a strange fascination in trying to spot who's playing who in what era/role – kind of a generational 'Where's Wally?' if you will.
This approach may have been budget-driven; after all, if you're going outside the so-called 'Hollywood system' to independently fund a movie, doesn't it make financial sense to have you're A-Listers playing more than one role? Why hire others to play them? Furthermore, it also indirectly benefits the whole mystical conceit that we are all linked through time – would the movie be as effective if different people were playing these roles? Who knows.
Like the 'Tree of Life' before it, it's been favorably compared to another not exactly mainstream movie: '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Both mix story and theme strands, but while Tree of Life maybe be the more Kubrickian, it has to be said that on the whole, Cloud Atlas is the more successful of the two, expertly weaving and interweaving to perfection the multiple scenarios that are cross-cutting across the huge running time.
This movie could easily be put in the 'don't make 'em like they used to' category: just when you thought that large, epic filmmaking was a relic of the past, here comes Cloud Atlas to shift your views: it's huge and dazzling entertainment, for sure, but the really telling thing is although it's juggling six story lines for almost three hours, it remains riveting the whole way. Brilliantly directed by Tom Tyker and the Wachowskis with a great musical score, Cloud Atlas is nothing short of a criminally underrated classic. Watch it and you will be transported, spellbound, touched and more importantly, entertained.