Review of Cloud Atlas (2012) by Grant S — 17 Mar 2014

(Spoilers).

Ambition far beyond its reach or grasp.

Cloud Atlas' ambition far exceeds its coherence, or extent of having a point. Nearly three hours long, set in six time periods, this is really a try-hard movie. Try hard, but fail, that is.

Incredibly ambitious, though you often get the feeling that the ambition was to win a Best Makeup Oscar, some of the stars are so well disguised.

And well disguised they have to be, as the producers' ambition also seemed to be to see how many different roles they can get out of as few actors as possible. You would think that the obviously large budget of this movie would allow the producers to hire many actors, but instead they have Tom Hanks doing six roles, Halle Berry six (one as a white woman!), Jim Broadbent five, Hugo Weaving six, Jim Sturgess six, Doona Bae six (including one as a white woman, one as a Mexican woman), the list goes on and on. The recycling of actors got very ridiculous, very quickly. It was laugh-out-loud stuff.

You could have excused them if there was a link between the different roles of the same actor, but there isn't. (Except for Hugo Weaving, who plays the villain in each scene. Well, that was a given, after The Matrix and, after all, this is directed by the Wachowski siblings).

At least when Stanley Kubrick used Peter Sellers in three different roles in Dr Strangelove it was for a good reason: budget (plus, that was Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers - you don't argue with cinematic icons like those).

This all said, some of the stories are interesting (though none are better than okay). The 1970s nuclear power plant one was probably the pick of the bunch, followed by the 1930s musical composition story, the 22nd century one (even though it borrowed from Soylent Green) and the 19th century one on the ship. The 2012 retirement home one was silly and the Future Vikings Meet Halle Berry Alien was plain pointless, and random.

No performances of note, especially as it was incredibly tedious and irritating seeing the same actors appear in every story, in different roles. Just made for confusion between characters.