ACTING
Tom Hanks and Halle Berry do a considerable amount of heavy lifting to manage the breadth of the six roles they each play, and hats off to Hugh Grant for finding new ways to manage “creepy” (1970s chauvinist nuclear energy asshat, plantation-running reverend, etc.). But the Best Chameleon awards go to Hugo Weaving and Jim Broadbent, and even though Jim Sturgess is great by the time he’s playing a fabricant-rescuer in Neo-Seoul, it’s hard not to think that the Wachowskis are really missing Keanu Reeves these days. — AW
Ensemble anchor Tom Hanks lives out an actor’s dress-up fantasy, but even at a hefty 2 hours and 40 minutes, covering six stories in five centuries means playing archetype sketches — stilted robot “fabricant,” kindly scientist, intrepid reporter, sleazy publisher — more than three-dimensional portraits. Breakout Ben Wishaw shows the most soulful intensity as reprobate composer Robert Frobisher. — HH
Doona Bae’s wide-eyed portrayal of “fabricant” clone Sonmi-451 is effective, but Tom Hanks seems to have the most fun when he’s playing the minor role of a thuggish author. David Gyasi’s intense take on Moriori stowaway Autua is the movie’s most compelling performance. — LW
DIALOG
The futuristic patois spoken by Hanks in his juiciest role — a mutant lingo somewhere between Uncle Remus laughable and Jar Jar Binks annoying — would undermine even the most accomplished actor. (Halle Berry never really had a chance with the “true-true.”) — LW
Up through the 2012 storyline, conventional dialog functions efficiently to move the plot forward. But in the future, things get weird: In Korea, “pure-bloods” enslave “fabricants” on their way to “exaltation,” effectively embodying a brainwashed population, but when Halle Berry and Tom Hanks chitchat in Creole-flavored patois — well, you just have to get used to it. — HH
In an attempt to stay true to Mitchell’s prose, the film’s directors (and book adapters) kept a lot of the future dialects that the author created for Cloud Atlas. Difficult to follow on paper — and almost as hard to keep up with on-screen — the dialog might be the thing that most alienates audiences, no matter how authentic it is. (Side note: Things that are eternally romantic in Mitchell’s prose seem downright cheesy coming from the mouths of trained thespians.) — AW
Voiceovers
Characters go deep not when they’re talking to other people, but in voiceovers that state big themes. In case you missed it the first time: “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and future. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” — HH
By turns eloquent and pretentious, the voiceovers truly help tie together the disparate stories. The way the voiceovers sometimes overlap storylines is a testament to the film’s powerful editing. — LW
Dear Reader: While being told what's happening can be downright annoying in some films, when putting a story on screen that was written largely in the form of letters, journals and book-within-a-book formats, having steady narration is necessary. — AW
SOUNDS & MUSIC
The past sounds rich and majestic, while the future sounds intriguing and new. Kudos to the sound designers and soundtrackers, who add an impressive heft to the film’s impact. — LW
The taut orchestral score keeps crying wolf — you think the action is peaking, but there’s a lot more to go. Plot-driving “Cloud Atlas Sextet” is good but not spine-chilling. The record store clerk says he can’t quit playing the old vinyl recording of the score requested by Halle Berry. Really? It’s not that memorable. — HH
Hearing what co-director Tom Tykwer did with the “Cloud Atlas Sextet” is one of the film’s real pleasures. (Tykwer composed the soundtrack with his musical partners
before shooting even started.) In the book, Robert Frobisher’s sextet is the soundtrack that ties many of the storylines together — and its composition is key to understanding the story’s structure. Hearing what it might sound like is remarkable. –AW
SCI-FI VISION
David Mitchell talks a lot of crazy about the future in the Cloud Atlas book — for example, entertainment devices are just called “sonys” — and describes a lot of gizmos that leave much to the imagination. Thank Sonmi the team behind the Matrix trilogy got a crack at bringing it to the screen: The Wachowskis add a bit of high-flying action that wasn’t as explosive in the novel, but makes for some sweet-looking futuristic sci-fi. — AW
The hovercraft chases and death-ray shootouts look cool enough, but the most chilling vision of the future comes during a retirement ceremony. So much for golden watches. — LW
Neo-Seoul reveals chilling vistas of customers gone wild during a Happy Meals-meets-Hooters restaurant staffed by mini-skirted fabricants. The lingo takes some getting used to: Instead of saying, “I wasn’t born to save the world,” Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) says, “I wasn’t genomed to alter the reality.” — HH
EDITING
The editing is probably the most impressive element of the movie. Keeping this constellation of stories and details from turning into a muddled mess — even for a viewer who has zero familiarity with the source text — is a keen accomplishment. — LW
Hop-scotching from farce to realism to fantastical storylines, the Wachowski siblings and Tykwer use elements and actions to bind one century to the next. Explosions, fire, gunshots and chases recur eternally through the centuries, like some kind of karmic echo chamber. — HH
Much like pimpin’, tying together six stories shot by three directors into a single three-hour movie ain’t easy. It could’ve been a hot, jumbled, nonlinear mess but somehow Alexander Berner did it: The way one character’s dialog illuminates another’s plight ties the film together in a way that’s fairly masterful, even when it’s a little overwrought. — AW
MAKEUP
In order to make the same-actor-in-multiple-roles motif work, most of the main cast of the film at one point or another plays someone of a different race or gender. Every so often — like when Hugo Weaving is playing the world’s most unappealing woman — it’s a little distracting. — AW
An Oscar-quality arsenal of beards, freckles, tattoos, wigs and moustaches disguise well-known actors to dramatize the film’s notion that bodies are just the window dressing for souls embarked on a long, long journey. — HH
The makeup is so imaginative and effective that the end credits, which flash pictures of each actor in all their roles, prove to be one of the movie’s most enlightening segments. — LW
DIRECTION
The most revolutionary thing about putting Cloud Atlas in the hands of three different directors might be that it doesn’t feel like it was made by three different directors. Matrix helmers Andy and Lana Wachowski have been directing together since the beginning, but the fact that they brought in Tom Tykwer without it messing up their vibe is impressive — it’s also a testament to the film’s artful editing. — AW
Three-headed directing beast smartly divvies up the storylines with Run Lola Run director Tykwer lending a naturalistic vibe to the 1936, 1973 and 2012 chapters. This leaves Lana and Andy Wachowski to dress up the fantastical stuff. The visual textures vary (two cinematographers were employed) but the theme is spacious enough to bring all the characters and their urgent conundrums into the same tent. — HH
On paper, turning Cloud Atlas into a successful movie sounds impossible. On the screen, the film’s three helmers make it look effortless. And that’s basically amazing. — LW
SPOT THE BIRTHMARKS
“But what do they all mean?” That’s every viewer of Cloud Atlas regarding the birthmarks that appear in the film. Truth is, the comet-like skin markings are meant to be enigmatic. Nearly every narrator in the book mentions either having one or seeing one, but their meaning isn’t explained. Presumably they indicate a connection between their bearers — the light from a single star takes ages to reach us, we are all travelers in the cosmos, blah blah blah — but there’s no Harry Potter-curse-scar reason for their existence. — AW
Halle Berry has one in 1973, meaning she’s a predestined catalyst for change — or something. Others share the birthmark, but blink and you’ll miss ‘em. The birthmark legacy doesn’t exactly pay off in a big way, but it’s a cool gimmick to suggest that nature encodes a larger design through the generations. — HH
At first, the recurring birthmarks seem heavy with portent, but in the end the whole thing seems more like a MacGuffin than a major element of the stories. Maybe I blinked and missed the momentous part. — LW
FINAL VERDICT
8 Like Watchmen before it, Cloud Atlas as a written piece of storytelling often seemed unfilmable: The novel is so expansive that a few hours of film could barely contain all its finest points. To that end, Cloud Atlas is the best movie version of the book anyone could ask for. Even when it is nearly collapsing under the weight of its own ambition, it holds up. — AW
WIRED A world-wide web IRL. Fabricants. TIRED Occasionally impenetrable dialects.
8 While the movie’s grand ambition must be admired, it feels a mile wide and an inch deep. None of the stories really hammer home Cloud Atlas’ central uplifting message — that we’re all interconnected through time and space — as thoroughly as the masterful editing and incessant voiceovers do. High-minded and consistently interesting, it makes up what it lacks in traditional storytelling punch by pulling off an inspired cinematic experiment. — LW
WIRED Soylent Green payoff. TIRED Space rastas.
7 Big-budget Cloud Atlas dazzles like a $100 million card trick. Filmmaker/magicians seem to shuffle the narrative deck with random abandon: Pick a storyline, any storyline and be amazed by what pops up. Beneath the chaos and makeup and costumes, the sometimes-silly Cloud Atlas delivers the kind of soulful pageantry rarely glimpsed on the big screen. See it and be stunned. — HH
WIRED Big-hearted connectivity theme: What goes around comes around. TIRED 2012′s senile retirement home escapees’ farcical shtick runs out of gas early.
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