Review of Cloud Atlas (2012) by Jay_Sherman — 04 Apr 2013

Cloud Atlas is a hot mess. There is about half a good movie here. The themes presented are relevant: love, dignity, freedom. Unfortunately they are sometimes presented in such a way as to seem trite or even cliched. There are also some strange and baffling elements that just don't work.

I'm also going to get this out of the way right now: I was not a fan of the use of yellowface and whiteface on non-Asian and non-Caucasian actors, but not for the politically correct reasons a lot of people were. I didn't feel that the characterizations were racist or offensive. My main problem was that with a few exceptions, it looked really unconvincing.

Of the six stories, I was most fond of the tale of Sonmi-451 (Neo Seoul, 2144). Her story was dark and tragic yet hopeful at the same time. The world she inhabits is a glitzy dystopia built upon the worst excesses of contemporary corporate culture. Of all the sequences, this one and the story of Robert Frobisher (Cambridge and Edinburgh, 1936) would have made enjoyable full-length films in their own right.

I liked the sequence set in the UK, 2012, starring Jim Broadbent as Timothy Cavendish in what was essentially a dark comedy vignette about an aging publisher and his gangster client (Tom Hanks). Even a throwaway joke about soylent green being people actually relates to a disturbing element in the Neo Seoul sequence.

The story set in the South Pacific in 1849 about a young lawyer who falls sick during a voyage and is under the care of a doctor who it emerges is poisoning him in order to steal his belongings but is saved by a runaway slave fell flat. Tom Hanks as Doctor Goose had a false nose and prosthetic buck teeth which made him look like a character from League of Gentlemen (the British comedy series, not the crappy adaptation of a good Alan Moore comic book). Predictably the lawyer, who is helping the slave by hiding him and then later gets him work as a sailor on the ship, become friends. When the lawyer returns home he declares to his slave-owning father-in-law that he and his wife will go east to aid with the abolition efforts. It should be powerful but it just feels cliched and somewhat cheesy.

I don't have too much to say about the sequence in which Halle Berry plays the main role. It was neither good nor bad and felt like an homage to movies of the era in which it was set, namely the early 1970s, featuring a tough, independent black journalist whistle-blower uncovering a conspiracy at a nuclear power plant run by an unscrupulous business man. Taken on its own, it could have made a rather average thriller with a few good moments of tension.

The sequence set on a post-apocalyptic Hawaii in the year 2321, just stank. It reminded me of Battlefield Earth, but with better production values and no use of dutch angles that I can remember. Tom Hanks plays a superstitious coward belonging to a tribe of people with vaguely Maori-like tattoos on their faces. He is plagued by hallucinations of Hugo Weaving as a character that can best be described as a goblin with a top hat, who I think is supposed to represent his fear and religious hang-ups. Tom Hanks' people live in constant fear of cannibals on horseback with fearsome facepaint. Halle Berry plays a character from some nice,shiny utopia where they have pretty, shiny vehicles and fusion power. She's on the island looking for some ancient secret which she tells Tom Hanks is "The true true." or some such childish baby-talk. It's all very confusing and stupid and ends with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry living happily ever after on some distant planet with two dozen grandchildren sitting around a campfire listening to Grampy Tom Hanks tell stories.

I haven't read the book, so I can't really compare it the source material. The principal cast appears throughout the movie in multiple roles because they're reincarnations of characters from earlier time periods, but it's not presented in chronological order. Some of it is intriguing. Some of it is hard to care about. Other parts are just plain weird and not always in a good or compelling way.