CLOUD ATLAS (Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski). See listing. Interview with actor Jim Broadbent. Rating: NN
Cloud Atlas gets lost in the ether.
It’s a high-concept adaptation of David Mitchell’s high-concept novel, which elegantly told six separate stories ranging from an epistolary 19th-century sea adventure to a futuristic tale about cloning and consumerism.
Directors Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings have taken apart Mitchell’s boomerang structure – he interrupted the stories, told in chronological order, in the first half and then concluded them in reverse order in the second – and spliced it together into a chaotic three-hour epic that, early on, is simply exhausting to watch. Think The Hours³.
They’ve also cast actors in several stories, probably to point up the book’s theme of reincarnation. But rather than sweeping us up into each tale, the strategy makes you wonder if that’s Halle Berry or Hugh Grant buried beneath layers of latex, or (in the worst cases) James D’Arcy and Jim Sturgess with eyes altered to make them look Asian.
Some sections – particularly the one set in a dystopia – work better than others, and the thing does come together near the end, but what a slog to get there.
