Every creative person's worst enemy is the ghost of the home run. Wanting to move people through art is an understandable impulse, but when left unchecked, it's the highway to Bullshit City. Greatness happens organically. If you swing too hard, you're going to end up hitting a foul ball or even worse, striking out. CLOUD ATLAS is a three hours long multi-generational epic adapted from David Mitchell's award-winning novel of the same name. It looks gorgeous and it has all the ambition in the world, but the end product is an ideological logjam that takes all sorts of shortcuts and detours in order to make its point. I don't know if the author or the Wachowski/Tykwer trio is to blame for this, but CLOUD ATLAS is a gorgeously shot mess.
It's too bad because the overarching theme is sort of beautiful.
The story of CLOUD ATLAS is complex and intricate, but I'll do my best to cram it in one paragraph without losing you. There are six storyline intertwined and the major roles are always played by the same actors : Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, the excellent and underrated Jim Sturgess and Donna Bae (from one of my favorite movies ever, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE). So, there's a tribesman in ancient times who speaks funny and has to face his own cowardice while helping an alien; a wealthy but sensitive kid who discovers the horrors of slavery; a bisexual composer struggling to reconcile his ambitions with his living; a 1970s mystery about the oil lobby in America; an elderly publisher's dealing with the aftershock of the success of a criminal memoir's he published and a futuristic story about dystopian Korea. It's all over the place, but don't worry, it's all so neatly wrapped up in the end.
Six storylines in three hours equals thirty minutes of on-screen time for each. I don't know if it was equally spread out, but the directors have seamlessly interwoven them into one another. So, you keep going from story to story without having the time to settle into one in particular. The mechanics are dynamic and engaging, but given the weight of the content it turned the narrative into something so simplistic, it was frustrating. Every story has an obvious "morale": men have to be courageous for the ones they love, racism is bad, creating something beautiful is the achievement of a lifetime, you have to fight for the truth, you have to be responsible for yourself and finally, you have to trust fate. It's so broadly drawn that it's easy to figure out within the five first minutes of each stories and then you have to sit through the rest, that's thinks you haven't figured it out yet. It comes out as pompous and self-important.
CLOUD ATLAS looks great, make no mistake about that. I'm sure it's a more satisfying experience on a theater screen.
It's a minor tragedy that CLOUD ATLAS comes out as obvious and telegraphed, because the point it's trying to make is beautiful and reveals itself gradually over the movie: human beings are all interconnected. Although the ways CLOUD ATLAS uses to build this idea are obvious (sometimes it's as simple as a patronizing voiceover by one of the characters), it's not that easy of an idea to push on people. We live in a time where people "work on themselves" are write lengthy Facebook posts about it, where Lady Gaga delivers self-contradicting monologues about how she doesn't give a fuck on stage (when she obviously does) and where 400 pages of selfies are a bestseller on Amazon. Saying : you'll heal and become whole by caring and helping other people is a courageous point to make and I'll give to CLOUD ATLAS that it doesn't use religion to do it. It's just not very efficiently coming together either.
CLOUD ATLAS is not a disaster, but it's quite messy. I would say it's so painfully obvious at times that it's frustrating. It has a pure heart and good intentions, though and in the end, making such a courageous statement is what we should remember from this movie. Sure, it looks great and the sprawling nature of the narrative makes that it never grows stale, visually speaking. Such a complicated, multi-layered story makes it difficult to really focus on the effort the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer put on shooting such a gorgeous movie. I swear to God, look at the scenery for too long and you'll miss some crucial plot point that's not important to the idea conveyed, but that'll make you lose the highway. CLOUD ATLAS is a textbook case of the ghost of the home run. It is so fucking enamored with what it's saying, it doesn't care about convincing its viewer and that is why the movie ultimately fell off the rails.