Cloud Atlas

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

Where do I begin? This is a great big Movie with a capital M. The word "ambitious" doesn't begin to describe it. Imagine six really good genre movies stripped down to their best and most essential 30 minutes, then woven together at points where the themes intersected. There is a single story connecting them all (you can trace how events in the earliest story rippled through each and eventually caused things to happen in the last), but mostly you just enjoy the film in the moment, as nearly every scene is enchanting in its own way. The best story is the most Wachowski-like, a vision of a dystopia where a high-tech varnish fails to obscure the most damning of humanity's traits, but even the weakest story, a farcical escape attempt from a retirement home, is still entertaining and thematically rich.

To explore the subtext about reincarnation in the original novel, the filmmakers decided to cast the same actors in each storyline. This is a good idea on paper that hurts the movie in practice, when actors are cast across racial lines without sufficient makeup to bridge the gap. In the middle of a dramatic and important scene, your brain shouldn't be distracted by an internal monologue about whether that black or Asian actor playing a white character is supposed to be a thought experiment or just lousy makeup. It's the only detail I would change about an otherwise masterful, sprawling epic that deserves a much wider audience than it received. See this movie; you'll definitely get your three hours and eight dollars worth.

− November 9, 2012 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply

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Evie Totty: “It ruled.”

I loved it. I simply loved it. It is probably hard to follow for some as it jumps around a lot, but if you can follow it, it's superb.

I did have a problem understanding the 'future English' that was spoken and the ... Americanization of one of the characters right before the Civil War was weird to say the least. Otherwise it was beautiful.

And the story. It is something to ponder. Do we have free will? Are we destined to make the same mistakes over and over? Can we ever change the outcome?

− December 23, 2012 • more by Evie • log in or create an account to reply

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