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A MISUNDERSTOOD MASTERPIECE: In their finest film since The Matrix (1999), the Wachowskis teamed with Tom Tykwer to create what may be the most emotionally draining and intellectually stimulating science-fiction film of all time. Tom Hanks and Halle Berry headlined the all-star cast. Courtesy: Cloud Atlas/Anarchos/X-Filme/Warner Bros.
CREDITS
Cloud Atlas Productions; Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, dir., scr., David Mitchell, novel; Stefan Arndt, Alex Boden, Grant Hill, pro.; Tykwer, Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, mus.; Frank Griebe, John Toll, cin.; Alexander Berner, Claus Wehlisch, ed.; Hugh Bateup, Uli Hanisch, prod. design; Kai Koch, Nicki McCallum, Charlie Revai, art dir.; Kym Barrett, Pierre-Yves Gayraud, costumes; Uwe Lehmann, Wesley Barnard, F/X; Clare Norman/Bluebolt, Kuba Roth, visual effects; Douglas Bloom/Method Studios, CGI effects; 172 min.; Color; 2.35:1.
CAST
Tom Hanks (Dr. Henry Goose/Hotel Manager/Isaac Sachs/Dermot Hoggins/Cavendish Look-a-Like Actor/Zachry); Halle Berry (Native Woman/Jocasta Ayrs/Luisa Rey/Party Guest/Ovid/Meronym); Jim Broadbent (Capt. Molyneux/Vyvyan Ayrs/Timothy Cavendish/Korean Musician/Prescient 2); Hugo Weaving (Haskell Moore/Tadeusz Kesselring/Bill Smoke/Nurse Noakes/Boardman Mephi/Old Georgie); Jim Sturgess (Adam Ewing/Hotel Guest/Megan’s Dad/Highlander/Hae-Joo Chang/Adam); Doona Bae (Tilda/Megan’s Mom/Mexican Woman/Sonmi-451/Sonmi-351/Sonmi Prostitute).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present.
SONMI-451
BACKGROUND
Starting with Run Lola Run (1998), Germany’s Tom Tykwer (1965–) set out to create a personal cinema in which any beginning leads to multiple possible outcomes as a result of minor mishaps, each yielding different results in diverse “real worlds.” These affect not only the protagonist and his/her immediate circle but also, as a result of the ripple effect set into motion, everyone in the universe.
Such an approach made Tykwer the right filmmaker to bring David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas to the screen. Borrowing the term for a unique style of painting often associated with Georges Seurat, Mitchell described the film adaptation of his novel as a “pointillist mosaic.” Lights, shapes, colors, and fleeting images of the human form close up appear only a phantasmagoric blur of bright dots, but focus as clear and concise portraiture. A great fan of the novel, Natalie Portman devoured sections between the filming of sequences for V for Vendetta (2005). Her intense interest caught the attention of one of that film’s directors, Lana Wachowski.
THE PLOT
In one of six interwoven stories, restaurant server and sex object Sonmi-451 escapes her pre-ordained role as a “fabricant,” or clone, when she is rescued by Hae-Joo Chang, a rebel-against-the-class-system intellectual. He mentors her both in radical politics and in the art of love, including (but not limited to) the physical. By chance, Sonmi comes across a film about Timothy Cavendish, the leading character in another of the film’s revolving narratives. As a result, she comes to grasp the distinction between who she is and the person (if that is the correct term) this human clone might become. Among the government secrets she learns is one that had been presented in the ambitious though failed 1973 film Soylent Green (which concludes with Charlton Heston screaming: “‘Soylent Green’ is people!”). Only by dying can Sonmi inspire future generations and, hopefully, assure the eventual demise of a system that has doomed her.
THE FILM
During the process of raising the necessary funds for what threatened to become the most expensive independent film of all time (final budget: $111 million), Andy and Lana Wachowski came to realize the impossibility of directing the entire piece. As Tykwer’s canon reveals a remarkable ability to underscore seemingly realistic tales with a surreal undercurrent, he opted to do the sequences set in 1936, 1973, and 2012; renowned for imaginative fantasy, the Wachowskis handled the far past (1849) and near (2144) and distant (2321) future.
A series of seemingly disparate but ultimately interlocking incidents occur in 1849 (the South Pacific), 1936 (England), 1973 (San Francisco), 2012 (England), 2144 (Neo Seoul), and 2321 (“The Big Island”), as well as a prologue and epilogue. As two of the tales take place in a spoiled future, Cloud Atlas qualifies as dystopian fiction.
Because of the presence of hardware, high-tech and deep impact, this one-of-a-kind film can be considered (if loosely) as an example of generic sci-fi.
THEME
The subjectivity of the individual human personality is at the heart of not only this film’s sensibility but also that of a great many other “serious” sci-fi films, particularly those of a post-modernist bent filmed during the early years of the twenty-first century. Here, beloved heroes and despised murderers are not “born” but made. Identity is the result of delicate, even flimsy, twists of fate that, given a split second more or less, could easily have altered—and by doing so, change (even reverse) a person’s destiny, as well as his or her supposed identity as “good” or “evil.”
Circumstances are the basis of everything, and they are, at best, coincident. All is relative; therefore, everything is subjective and impermanent. Consequently, outcomes invariably alter as a result of the slightest glitch in the unfolding space-time continuum. Still, Cloud Atlas remains not only positive but also faith based, if in a humanistic vein. Nothing is more profound than the smallest act of human kindness; such moments can, will, must lead to great revolutions that, after much pain and suffering, result in the betterment of life.
TRIVIA
Portman was slated to play Sonmi-451. Her pregnancy, simultaneous with the finalization of a production schedule, rendered that impossible. The “451” references the 1953 Bradbury novel (and 1966 Truffaut film) Fahrenheit 451. The only previous film to attempt such an ambitious crosscutting over the centuries was D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), though that epic contained no corresponding futuristic elements.
Mitchell’s essential idea in the novel is that all people are interconnected. The casting of the actors in multiple roles took this literary conceit and presented it via a device uniquely suited to the medium of movies.