Cloud Atlas

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I approached this film with an equal mix of curiosity and apprehension. After seeing it Saturday morning, both feelings were turned out to be valid. 

David Mitchell's novel is a set of six stories that are presented in a ladder format (i.e. the first half of each story is presented in sequence until the final story, at which the second halves are unveiled in reverse order. The stories are not entirely self-contained and details start to cross over and get reinforced as you move through the book). 

Settings range from the South Pacific of the 1850's, to 1930's Belgium, 1970's California, present-day England, a futuristic Korea and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Each story is also handled in a  different literary style. 

The movie was directed by Tom Twyker ("Run Lola Run") and the Wachowski siblings (the "Matrix" trilogy). The Wachowskis handled the first story and the last two; Twyker directed the other three. The principal cast included Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and others. 

In the transition from page to screen, they made some changes to the story lines and also abandoned the ladder approach, cutting between stories throughout the film. At times, the cross-cutting was useful in establishing the echoes between the stories. When it worked, it worked very well. 

To reinforce the idea of inter-connection between the stories, they used the same principal cast to play roles in each stories. For example, an actor might play the "lead" in one story, but a minor role in another.  The roles crossed racial and gender boundaries. 

I found this approach worked well in only a few cases and some of the combinations were appallingly bad. The English actors tended to handle the differing roles most effectively; the Americans less so. Hanks probably came off as the worst of the bunch, He was not only unable to create realistic characters in a couple of the stories but he was also saddled with make-up effects that accentuated the failure). 

The other problem with the film was that it tended to underline the themes of the novel in a very ham-handed fashion. Particularly in the Neo-Seoul section of the movie, it was a little too reminiscent of the worst excesses of the last Matrix movie. 

Overall, the movie was an interesting, if very flawed attempt at filming what some felt was  "unfilmable". I don't agree with that view and, if anything, the best approach might have been to approach the novel as a mini-series for television. It would have given each story the time it deserved and could have been handled in a way that allowed the different stories to be shot in a variety of styles as was done in the book.