Watched: Cloud Atlas

This is a wonderful, powerful film that requires you to give in to its occasional silliness so it can really hit home with its core message. As far as I could glean, the message is captured in an excellent monologue by one of Ben Whishaw’s characters, where he states that all boundaries are conventions - that is, the things that make one day different from the next are being cowed by the people who keep traditions and conventions strong. It’s acutely personal, but each of the characters is one of the downtrodden, and they each attempt to challenge the status quo in a number of equally powerful ways.

But. Stepping back, for a moment. Cloud Atlas, like the novel upon which it’s based, is a collection of six stories that have common threads (and a common cast, playing a variety of different roles) but other than that are tonally different. There’s a story set aboard a ship at the height of slavery; a period piece about a bisexual composer during the interim between World Wars; a conspiracy thriller about a young reporter who stumbles across a terrifying plan; an Ealing comedy about a publisher who falls in with a couple of bad crowds; a revolutionary transhuman epic set in 2144 Neo Seoul, and a post-apocalyptic drama that features Hugh Grant as a feral cannibal on horseback.

In the novel (which I haven’t read), each story is told up to its midpoint, one by one, up until the farthest point in the future, at which point it dials all the way back again. The film eschews this in favour of a mosaic style, telling its story through a philosophical undercurrent rather than stereotypical dramatic beats. I suspect this is why it deterred a few critics; Cloud Atlas is deeply meditative, and demands that you allow yourself to be swept up in its grand vision, and if you spend too much time focusing on Halle Berry as a white Jewish person (or Hugh Grant as an old man, or Jim Sturgess as a Korean action hero) and ignore that what they’re actually doing is representing the theme of a continuous unbroken thread, then it’s entirely possible that you’ll dislike it.

Get past that, though (and there really is some joy in seeing Hugo Weaving in full Nurse Ratched makeup), and you’re left with something quite unlike any film released in the last decade - a genre-spanning visual feast that tells its story through ideas rather than events. That’s not to say the film is uneventful - no scene feels wasted - but the key thing is the meaning behind those events, not the immediate visceral feeling.

This is one I’ll definitely be coming back to.