"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."
~ Taken From Cloud Atlas
Now, I saw Cloud Atlas for the first time well over a decade ago. It was during my transatlantic flight, on my way back from the first ever trip to Poland which I took. Technically, it was actually from one of the layover spots. Namely, Berlin, which we had also visited.
Something about Cloud Atlas intrigued me, although I admittedly did not know much about the movie. It seemed a strange and very unorthodox movie, but not necessarily in a bad way.
In fact, after watching this movie recently for what would be the third time, it seems to me that I rather like it. That said, it still seems an unusual movie in many respects. But I will get into that in more details in just a little bit.
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
Okay, so by now if you are still reading this, I have to imagine that you either are familiar with this movie already, or perhaps you do not mind the spoilers. Please just don't say that you were not given advanced warning.
Sometimes, when I try to review movies, it helps to think of some movies which are somewhat similar. But there just are not any movies which I know of that are similar to Cloud Atlas. Or rather, there are movies which have some things in common, but which are radically different in many other respects. I guess that this movie deserves respect right off the bat for being able to stand alone in this regard. Whatever else you say about Cloud Atlas, it at least is original and unique.
Now, in terms of format, this movie feels somewhat similar to Crash (2004) or Go (1999). Not that it has much of anything else in common with those movies, other than the way it plays out, jumping from scenario to scenario with the different cast of characters. Where it is most glaringly different is that Cloud Atlas is a story spanning literally centuries. It goes back as far the time of slave ships being a British industry and has numerous different stories between then and close to the present, as well as two very different versions of the future. The first takes place well over a century from now in Neo Seoul, after much of the older part of Seoul has sunk below water. Than the second part which takes place in the future might seem, at first, to take place in the distant past. But this version of the future sees human beings almost living like in olden times many centuries - even possibly millennia - ago. Slowly but surely, we catch more and more glimpses of the remnants of what is our own world, and allusions to the modern wonders which somehow or other were lost over the centuries.
You might think that it might seem impossible to bring all of these stories together, to connect them in any meaningful way. Yet, they are all somehow related, albeit loosely. Sometimes, the connection is actually felt by the characters, particularly when Halle Berry's character from 1973, Luisa Rey, somehow seems quite familiar with a very obscure orchestral piece entitled Cloud Atlas, despite it being an extremely rare piece, with only a handful of copies existing in the world. There is no way, really, that she should be familiar with the piece, yet she clearly is.
Each of the scenarios feature characters facing unusual tests of their character and moral fabric. This includes Adam Ewing, a wealthy son-in-law looking into his wife's family business: slavery. When he sees the reality, he becomes sick, quite literally. He sees the slaves as human, making him unique among the whites aboard the ship. While on the ship, he becomes seriously ill, and seems on the verge of death, although we understand that the greedy doctor appears to be keeping him sick and making him sicker, so that he personally could benefit financially. By the time the young man returns home to San Francisco, he vows to go to the East Coast to champion the cause of abolitionism, much to the consternation of his father-in-law.
There is a young man, Robert Frobisher, who is an aspiring classical musician. Though poor, he takes a job with an old, established composer, Vyvyan Ayrs. Ayrs is quite eccentric and often unpleasant. It seems like it will be rocky at first, but then they are able to compose some incredible pieces (I hesitate to say they make beautiful music together, given what happens). Eventually, Frobisher manages to write a brilliant piece which the older musician is certain he heard in his dreams. They both take credit for it, causing a little bit of a riff. Yet, they seem to resolve it by agreeing that this beautiful piece could not have been created by either of them individually, but together, ensemble. However, Ayrs begins to mock Frobisher for his homosexuality and perceived deviancy, forcing him to continue living and working under him by threat of professionally killing off his prospects as an aspiring musician. Eventually, Frobisher decides to leave anyway, but Ayrs takes the composition they wrote, which is named, fitting, Cloud Atlas. Frobisher has obtained a gun by this point and has had enough, but he only accidentally shoots Ayrs. After that, he lives life in exile and, eventually, commits suicide moments before his homosexual lover finds him in his bathtub.
Remaining in the past, but growing more modern (1973), the movie turns to a report, Luisa Rey, played by Halle Berry. She is trying to write a piece which would expose the incredible safety hazards of a nuclear facility in California. The place is a ticking time bomb, but this secret is kept by a violent killer working for forces who stand to profit by this facility failing. Rey meets an older nuclear physicist named Rufus Sixsmith, who is quite taken by her. In fact, at some point, we hear his thoughts, and he is wondering if he could have fallen in love with her so quickly after meeting. He provides her the secrets she needs to blow the lid on this story, which is outrageous on several ends. Despite several attempts on her life by the corporate killer, she does manage to publish the story in the end.
One of the other stories focuses on an old man, Timothy Cavendish, who is a struggling publisher in the modern day. However, when one of his authors throws a violent fit against a critic and winds up killing him, sales of the book go through the roof. However, when this author's gang goes after Cavendish, he turns to his brother for protection. His brother, however, tricks him into checking into what he thinks is a hotel, but is actually a nursing home which allows nobody to leave. There, Cavendish encounters Nurse Noakes, who immediately conjures up some similarities to Nurse Ratched from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next." Cavendish keeps running into trouble, always assuming he can find a way out. Finally, he works with other residents who also want to make their escape, and they eventually manage to attain their freedom. Cavendish even works up the courage to rekindle the romance with his own true love.
Next, we go to the futuristic Neo Seoul. This part makes this movie feel straight up like science fiction. There were scenes which reminded me of I Robot or The Fifth Dimension or even Star Wars (particularly the city scenes in Attack of the Clones). The glitz of the bright lights and highly advanced technology at first seems intoxicating, but it disguises a grimmer reality. This city is completely controlled by Nea So Copros, a corporate governing body which maintains strict control over every resident's life. In this world, there are purebloods - naturally born people - and there are fabricants, who as the name suggests, are created, fabricated for specific uses. One of those uses is sex slavery. Sonmi-451 is one of those fabricants, but she feels more than the others and desires escape. To that end, she finds herself saved and making her escape with the help of a rebel named Hae-Joo Chang, who himself is part of a revolutionary group. This is the part where the movie begins to feel almost like the Matrix, as Sonmi (for short) learns of the manufactured nature of her own existence, and how the physical bodies of fabricants is used to fuel the machine of their own oppression, quite literally. There is a battle, and the rebels lose. Everyone is ultimately killed, including both Hae-Joo Chang and Sonmi. Yet, her recorded thoughts and revelations apparently have a universal appeal, as she becomes the basis and her words the teachings of a new religion of liberation, which we find the characters in the even more distant, albeit grimmer, future have heard of and apparently believe in.
Finally, the last glimpse we see of the future in this universe is not a particularly promising one. It seems at first glance to be the distant past, a time of myths and virtual savages known as the Kona on horseback terrorizing locals. This occurs at some unknown time, but it is well after some immense and apparently global "Fall." The story takes place on some Hawaiian island, where Zachry Bailey (played by Tom Hanks) is struggling to exist as a goatherd belonging to the Valley tribesmen. They are constantly under threat by the Kona, to the point where Bailey himself is haunted by watching his own brother and nephew die at their hands while he cowered and watched. It is in this world that he sees a visitor, who winds up being Meronym (played by Halle Berry) who comes to visit via a fast modern boat. She is from the "Prescients", a technologically advanced off-world society of human beings, but which happens to be dying from a plague. Meronym has come to this primitive and dangerous island searching for a forgotten communication station on Mauna Sol, and she expects Bailey to be her guide and lead her to it. Ultimately, they do find it, and she is able to send out the distress call. But then Bailey sees that his own village, meanwhile, has been attacked by the Kona. It is time to make a stand, and together with Meronym's modern weapons, they manage to kill off the Kona. At the very end, we see that Bailey and Meronym are married and with many children, as he looks to the sky and tells them of his old planet Earth, now just a distant light in the sky.
Some fascinating stuff, truly. It seems like the risk would be to stretch these stories too thin. Yet, the ideas are unified by certain themes. Also, somehow, most of these stories pack some emotional punch, which is quite a feat for such an ambitious movie. Of course, it is a longer than average movie, but it still feels like a serious accomplishment.
There are points where this movie feels a bit like some other movies. I already mentioned some similarities to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" specifically with the Cavendish character and the virtual prison/insane asylum that he tries relentlessly to escape. The futuristic scenes which are supposed to take place in Neo Seoul feel like a mixture of the Fifth Dimension and I Robot. Some of the more classically British scenes look like they might be part of some 19th or early 20th century films about Britain, particularly about authors and poets. The scenes which are set in 1973 feel like they could belong in some seventies movies. Indeed, it feels like this movie has a little bit of something for everyone.
It also feels like it has a message. And this message likely is more relevant today than even when this movie came out. The message seems to be that no matter what the age or place or the specific circumstances, there are always the oppressors and always those who are forced under their boots, their would be victims. The thing that each of the sympathetic characters have in this movie, across time and space, is that life seems to be a never ending, relentless struggle for all of the characters. We can call it oppression, and we can perhaps single out human greed as the cause. One way or the other, however, it is this eternal battle between the worst human instincts and the best human instincts that play out. The oppression can be slavery, a selfish old artist wanting to remain relevant over a newer, up and coming artist, prejudice against homosexuality, corporate greed, an anonymous, all controlling corporate state straight out of Orwell's 1984 in Neo Seoul, or a rising group of violent gangs who basically destroy everyone who is not them in a world still just trying to get back on it's knees after some kind of unexplained apocalypse has wiped out what we would recognize as modern humanity.
What I can say is that I appreciated it more with each subsequent movie. Don't get me wrong: I liked it the first time that I saw it back on a plane in 2013. But I came to like it and be more fixated by it with subsequent viewings. And I highly recommend it to anyone with patience enough to give it a chance.
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