Arguably the most reviled as well as the most loved film of 2012, Cloud Atlas is a sprawling, sweeping, messy epic of a film based on the sublime, but equally complicated novel of the same name by the uniquely talented David Mitchell.
When I first picked up Cloud Atlas the novel in 2008, I simply could not put it down, reading it obsessively into the night, carrying it around in my bag so I could read it at every spare moment. I am not alone in the way I reacted. In 2005, Natalie Portman was also carrying it around on the sets of V for Vendetta, the seventh feature film by the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix trilogy fame). When Lana Wachowski asked Portman what she was reading, the quest to make Cloud Atlas began.
With six extremely complicated story lines woven together into a richly detailed tapestry featuring recurring characters, spanning five different centuries, each story told in its own distinctive style, the novel proved a nightmare to adapt.
The Wachowskis’, along with their friend Tom Tykwer who made the indie hit Run Lola Run (1998), holed up for a massive writing session, finally coming up with a script that David Mitchell himself approved. He had previously thought it could not be possible.
Watching Cloud Atlas, therefore, can be quite the experience. If you see the film without having read the book, you may find yourself slightly bewildered. However, if you have imagination you will soon find yourself lost in six different, fascinatingly realised worlds, all of which are interconnected, where characters migrate from one story to another, sometimes in an almost unrecognisable form, but tied together by beautifully thought out, perfectly structured interlocking themes.
The six stories take place in vastly different times. With Adam Ewing’s (Jim Sturgess) story, we find ourselves with a young American lawyer who sails to the Chatham Islands in 1849 on behalf of his future father-in-law. Ewing finds himself inadvertently freeing a slave on the island and being slowly poisoned by the ship’s doctor.
In 1936, England, we have Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), a prodigiously talented composer struggling with his bisexual identity as he tries to finish his masterpiece which he titles The Cloud Atlas Sextet. During a creative hiatus, Frobisher finds and becomes entirely engrossed in a portion of Adam Ewing’s journal chronicling the above-mentioned adventures.
In 1973, San Francisco, Luisa Rey a young intrepid journalist, played by Halle Berry, meets Rufus Sixsmith (James D’Arcy), Frobisher’s lover, now an elderly man forever saddened by Frobisher’s suicide. He is a renowned nuclear physicist who is on the verge of exposing an unsafe power plant.
He also carries around the original manuscript of The Cloud Atlas Sextet.
In London, 2012, Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent), a slightly dodgy old publisher ends up with a manuscript of Luisa Rey’s story. He winds up locked in an old people’s home by his vengeful brother. His hilarious escape from the home is made into a film.
In Neo Seoul, Korea, 2144, we meet Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), a clone who is to become the leader of the rebellion against an authoritarian regime. While the resistance hides her, she comes across the film about Cavendish.
It is Sonmi’s myth that is perpetuated in 2321, after ‘The Fall’ where Zachry (Tom Hanks) lives in a primitive tribal society. Here he is visited by Meronym (Halle Berry again), a ‘prescient’ who is looking for something from the past.
Confused? Don’t be. Watch Cloud Atlas. Decide for yourself if it is a magnificent success or an ambitious failure. I promise you won’t be bored.
Cloud Atlas, directed by Lana Wachowski