2 hours, 50 minutes
Drama/Science Fiction, 2012
Directed by The Wachowski's and Tom Tykwer
Starring
Tom Hanks
Jim Broadbent
Halle Berry
Hugo Weaving
Ben Whishaw
Jim Sturgess
Doona Bae
Susan Sarandon
Hugh Grant
"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."
Cloud Atlas is a bit of an enigma to me. On one hand, it has some pretty interesting concepts, but on the other, these concepts don't always reach their full potential. The film is told through several different overlapping segments. Some of the segments take place in Colonial Europe, others take place in the far off future on different planets.
I think this is where Cloud Atlas has most of it's problems. Only half of the stories are even somewhat interesting. Only a couple of them actually stand out among the rest. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for multiple storylines with different characters. I think Magnolia is the best movie ever. And I think it's really cool that the idea of reincarnation plays a major part in that aspect. But this is where it tries too hard. The movie makes itself to be a huge sweeping epic, but it really isn't. They get across the idea that everything is connected, then repeat it again and again and it just old. And while the nearly 3 hour runtime feels short due to the story jumping, none of the stories have any kind of interesting climax. I often felt underwhelmed by the realizations in the storytelling.
The writing is okay though. The dialogue in one of the future settings was really REALLY off mostly because they're trying to go too futuristic with it, but half the time I had no idea what the fuck they were saying. But that was the really cool story, so it kind of annoyed me.
Oddly enough, one of the more captivating stories was set in present day with Jim Broadbent as the focus character. It's a simple and often comedic story with a hilarious finale, and while it wasn't as ambitious as the others, it was just better.
One very distracting thing about the movie is how they handle... well, skin color. Sounds weird, right? I know. I was thrown off too. Especially when Halle Berry walked into the room as a white woman. And then a bunch of white dudes show up as asian dudes. And then the asian woman shows up in the end as a white woman.
What the fuck?! I mean, I get that it's important that the characters are reincarnated, but they don't look at all like white people or asian people or whatever. The asian chick definitely does not look white. She just looks asian with green eyes. And the white guys who are trying to be asian don't look asian at all, even though their makeup suggests they should. They honestly don't look asian. Makeup can only go so far. Unfortunately, it doesn't go far enough, and it just winds up being distracting. Even more distracting is Hugo Weaving, who as usual, plays bad guys, is at one point (basically) Nurse Ratched. Like, in makeup and costumes and shit. As a woman. Yeah. It's pretty awful. Trying to get your point across by putting the actors in weird costumes and makeup and trying to make them look not white or black or asian but something else just doesn't work as well as you think it does. It's just distracting. At least for me it was.
The strongest area of Cloud Atlas is it's performances. Jim Broadbent and Tom Hanks highlight a great cast. Regardless of what time period they're in, they always manage to steal the show. Nothing inherently wrong with the supporting cast either. Except Hugo Weaving in drag. Just fuckin' weird.
Cloud Atlas tries to be far too ambitious. It doesn't need all of the stories that it tries to tell. At least the good stories are good and interesting, but others are just forgettable. And regardless of which story it's trying to tell, the message often feels shoved down your throat.
6/10
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