Cloud Atlas

After our last review I promised that we'd do the 80's fantasy epic(?) Legend before Cloud Atlas. So maybe right now you're like "yo, where the fuck is the Legend review? All I fucking came here to read about was Legend. None of this bullshit cloudy with a chance of who gives a shit." Clearly you do not follow our twitter feed. We did, in fact, do a review of Legend. But it was submitted to another movie blog, aptly titled Movie-Blogger.com, and if you are desperate to get our take on the Blade Runner followup, you can find it right here.

If you're one of the few willing to stick around for some Cloud Atlas talk, read on.

Netflix: Are you kidding? It just came out on DVD. Give it a chance, will ya?
Picker: Crimson Dynamo

Mark:  So this is my second time watching Cloud Atlas and I noticed new things as I went along, but knowing that you’ve read the book, I just want to start by asking you how it matched up.  Maybe that’s a bit broad, but I mean, this is a movie with essentially six stories which I thought it handled well and I want to know how it was in the book compared to this.

Dylan: Yes, I read it. I figured I ought to make that clear early on, but I'll try not to reference the book too often. However, since you asked, the major difference with the book is the structure. The book is like a pyramid. You go up through the first half of each story and then reverse back for each one's respective climax. To an extent, the way the film moved through all of them throughout its runtime kept it more exciting than the book. But at times they raced through several at a time, devoting only a few seconds to each, making it difficult to remember what was going on the last time you were in this particular story and how what just happened relates to the other ones being thrown at you. Especially when they're all completely different.

Mark: Yeah, I liked how well the movie moved from one story to the next without any real loss of flow.  The editing was amazing, being able to blend the scenes together, like with the horses across the bridge to the train, with the sound being able to link them.  It helped keep everything engaging without becoming too jarring with the changes.  Now, you do need to stop for a second to realize where you are, but since each of the stories are so unique, I never really felt lost.  Each one had a different feel that after a while you would know where you were in the timelines by the look of the scene.  The Somni story had the most changes throughout, since it was the grandest in scale, compared to the others, but like I said, after a while, they all had their own unique feel.  Which only adds to the strength of the editing and narrative flow that the individual stories didn’t feel disjointed.  All separate, but all connected; they did this so well in my opinion.

Dylan: I’m on the fence. I agree that they flowed well visually -- and for the most part you were able to see the parallels between stories (more clearly than in the book) -- but contextually things were out of sync. There were three or four voice-overs meant to sort of describe the philosophical themes of the story. But I didn’t really feel like they united them all that much. And the stories are all very different, even tonally. One is more humorous, another is a mystery, another is obviously futuristic sci-fi. And it almost seems like if you separated each story, it might make an interesting movie on its own, but mashed together it was just a jumbled mess.

Mark: I totally agree that any one of these could make a good movie on their own.  Okay, maybe not the lawyer on a ship in the Colonial Era, but still, they all could essentially.  But I felt that the filmmakers excelled at giving each story an identity, while subtly binding them together.  Obviously the birthmark that each protagonist shared, but I mean the constant theme of freedom, or understanding in each.  Maybe that’s a tad broad, but it worked for me.  Even though one story was very dark while another is about a bunch of old people escaping from an old folks home, they kept those same themes, keeping them together.  Now, I admit, sometimes, just narratively, I was more interested in some stories more than others, but I never felt things were too jumbled to stay together.  Also I just enjoyed looking out for all the actors in each story.  Fun little game to play while going along.

Dylan: Yea okay, the two things I was very impressed with were the makeup and the music. The movie flowed incredibly from scene to scene. And having a half dozen actors play multiple roles, spanning age, ethnicity, and gender was a pretty ambitious task. I would complain about how, when all of the westerners were made to look Asian, they looked ridiculous, but I won’t, because every other costume was really fantastic.

Mark: Yeah, the makeup is just astounding throughout, creating all of these characters and also being able to perpetuate the idea of lives beyond lives.  And the thing with the makeup that I most enjoyed is when they had some of the major people just in once shot, as something so innocuous, like Jim Broadbent as a blind musician on the dirty streets of  Neo Seoul.  It just adds to the subtlety of the film.  And I liked the fact that they had the actors playing characters of different race and gender, it worked to create paralells throughout the movie.  Sturgess playing a character who becomes an advocate for the abolitionist movement, and then in the future, he’s already a fighter for freedom.  The race doesn’t matter, it’s the actions that matter.

And the music, for me, was one of my favorite scores of 2012.  Throughout the movie, being able to convey the emotions of the scenes so perfectly with the music, but have it work in all the different times.  Either having it be just the quiet piano or have it become bombastic for the action, it all has the same feel.

Dylan: I guess you can interpret the movie in different ways, especially since the same actors play multiple roles. In the book, it wasn’t made clear -- at least not to me -- who was who in each timeline, or if that was really the meaning at all (with the exception of three or four of them commenting on birthmarks). In the movie, certain characters are the same throughout. Hugo Weaving is a good example; he is consistently the antagonist. So it forces you to think about the recurring roles of each...soul, I suppose, and it’s a big step away from the book.

I guess my only complaint is that, while on the surface, the movie seems very deep and philosophical and beautiful, when you try to dig deeper, each story is kind of hollow. I don't blame the filmmakers, because the book suffered from a similar weakness. For each story, you’re barely given enough to understand what is going on and why. The worst case is the story of Sonmi, and the following story in which Sonmi is an idol. I kept asking myself things like “well, what’s so special about Sonmi? They just rescue her and tell her she’s a messiah. But why?” And before you get any answers, she is captured. What is Union? What is The Fall? Now, I don’t expect the book or the movie to stop and give us an entire history lesson of this future, but there definitely needed to be more development in order for me to care at all about certain characters. Other than one characters saying something like ‘it’s as if we’re all connected through time like clouds in the sky and the blah blah blah.’ That’s very Romantic, but I’m not really convinced.

Mark: I agree that the future stories could have really used more fleshing out.  Again, that adds to the idea that some of these stories could have made for interesting individual movies. We’re only given what we need to know for the stories themselves, nothing more.  So we don’t know how Somni’s words affect the world and the colonies.  We don’t know how that one story leads to the post-apocalyptic world.  Hell, this could have somehow become an interesting mini-series, which would have let it flesh everything out.  Personally, I would have loved to see more about the authority in Neo Seoul.  How the world is run and how the rebellion got started.  But, yeah, that’s a lot to ask for from a film that’s already clocking at around three hours.  Some stories are better contained than others since they are less expansive in scope.  I think this is the type of movie in which looking at it on the surface is fine and you come away with a really enjoyable and well done film, and you can only look so deep before things begin to give way.  Like you can look at the themes that run throughout, but too much on the stories themselves leave you wanting.

Dylan: Bingo. The trouble is that the movie wants so desperately to be deep and meaningful. But the Wachowski’s and Tykwer made the best of what they had. The cinematography was cool, the acting was very good, and the style choices were new and creative. In that respect, I really enjoyed it.

Mark: I personally loved this movie.  I think it was one of the more ambitious and engaging films of 2012.  The acting was entertaining and at some points just brilliant, in my opinion.  The standouts for the movie were the makeup, editing, and music.  And I know it’s almost three hours long, but even on a second watch, I found myself absorbed and noticing new things, like the actors in the different roles, and story elements.

And just to ask, which of the stories did you like the most?  As a personal choice.

Dylan: The Sonmi story had the most interesting world-building. It just didn't go anywhere with it. So I suppose I found the Cavendish story the most entertaining. And that reminds me, I wanted to ask what you thought of the dialect in the most futuristic story. Even in the book it is kind of distracting. Do you think they made the right choice to honor the book or should they have smoothed it out a little bit so that the story made more sense?

Mark: Well, the first time I watched the movie, I found it pretty irritating, just cause we’re given nothing to based this language on, so I was lost for a part of it as to what they were saying.  Second time, I could understand more.  It worked to show how separate this story was in its own time, but it did leave you alone as to what was being said.

And my favorite was the Frobisher story.  It was the least actiony of all of them, but it was the most engaging to me.  The acting was amazing by everyone in this very simple, but very intense story.  And the ending of that particular story was just done so well.  Also I liked how it had a direct living connection to the following story, which created more emotional depth.

Dylan: Trivia?

Mark: I’ve got two things.  First, how many oscars did it go up for?

Dylan: Hm. Three or four, probably. The makeup was pretty impressive.

Mark: Further reason why I have lost all faith in the academy: jack fucking none.  Which still blows my mind.

Dylan: The sad part is I watched those awards and don't even remember.

Mark: It went up for nothing, even though, without a doubt, it had the best makeup, bar none.  And the music should have gone up; it was amazing.  It’s a real shame that nothing was given to them.  I would've hoped, because it was such an ambitious film, they would have given them something.

Dylan: And number 2?

Mark: Andy and Lana Wachowski directed three stories, while Tom Tykwer directed the other ones. Can you guess who did what?

Dylan: Well, I could be an ass and say the Wachowskis did the ones involving gender-crossing actors. But instead, I’ll say they did the two future ones and...maybe Luisa Ray?

Mark: So damn close.  The Wachowski’s did do the future stories, but the third one is... the 1849 story.  So they did the furthest and earliest, while Tykwer filled in the middle.

Dylan: The ol' Wachowski sandwich. Classic.

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There you go. A long review for an even longer movie. I encourage you to read it again and try to figure out which lines are Mark's and which are mine.

Oh, damn, we label them now? Well, never mind then. Just look out for our next review, End of Watch, starring the brother of not-Katie Holmes' Rachel Dawes and the stereotyped Latino from Crash.