Cloud Atlas (2012)

I feel that any good review of a movie should start by reviewing on the movie's terms. For the most part, I would say that this entails walking into a movie totally cold, not reading any reviews beforehand, watching as few trailers as possible, and even avoiding source materials if that is the only way to objectively judge the film on its merits as a film. Only in rare cases do I think a film needs to be judged as an addition to a franchise. My problem with this high bar of reviewing is that I am a sucker for spoilers. It's hard for me to be patient enough to wait for the movie, and so I cheat. In this case, I read and listened to maybe a dozen reviews and spoiler specials before going in. I did not, however, read or listen to the actual book upon which the movie is based. So not only did I walk into this movie with a strong set of preconceived notions and well memorized spoilers, I did not walk in prepared to compare the movie to its book. (Cloud Atlas, by the way, has jumped to the top of my book list, right after Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart).

What I can say is that the movie is super long, totally labyrinthine, and also totally awesome. The film cuts quickly among the 6 storylines, spending much of its time and energy drawing parallels between characters from different stories, and giving little room to analysis of the stories as individual pieces. The truth is, if you watch this movie as 6 separate 30 minute films, it is likely that only 2 of them would stand out as being fun and interesting in their own right, and both of those borrowed heavily from previous works of fiction. Never before have I seen a work of art that is so clearly greater than the sum of its parts. The individual stories aren't what matters in this movie, what really matters are the parallels drawn among the stories and their characters. The strongest tie that binds is the comet birthmark. Each story has a central character with a seemingly unique comet shaped birthmark. This character is portrayed by a different actor in each story, and, it would seem, is the one soul whose progression through many lives we can directly trace from story to story. Some stories are stronger than others. The present-day story which stars Jim Broadbent, is probably my favorite. In particular, it features a wonderful speech about strong Scotsman defending their countrymen from the English which might be the most joyous point in the movie. The strongest dramatic story, for me at least, was the story of the 1930s, starring Ben Whishaw. The problem is, I cannot consider the story of the 1930s without also considering the story of the 1970s and how one character's story starts in one and ends in the other. As the tagline reads, everything is connected. The hopeless romantic in me loves the idea that a person can have a true love who they not only love but love again and again from one lifetime to another, and the social progressive in me loves that that couple can be gay or straight, young or old, and often interracial, and that the individual souls themselves can switch roles every once in a while, as our protagonist's comet soul drifts for Jim Sturgess through Whishaw, Halle Berry, Broadbent, Doona Bae, and finally the completes the journey as an inexplicably impossible to understand Tom Hanks.

My official recommendations are as follows: if you are easily confused by un-subtitled dialects and interweaving stories, don't go, you will hate this movie. I found that more than anything else the things that really made me happy during this movie were the loves stories which built over time. Sappy as that sounds, this movie made me a sucker for its love stories. In the end, Cloud Atlas gives us a bold and beautiful vision of the past, the present, and the future, but all of this really serves as window dressing for the human dramas that steal the show.