2) Cloud Atlas
This list could easily include other Wachowski works like the entire Matrix trilogy, yes even Reloaded and Revolutions, or the beautiful hot mess that was Speed Racer. It could also include Tom Tykwer’s previous film Perfume, which both suffers from and subsequently plays with the fact that film is still a medium that cannot engage all of our senses, such as smell. So when these three filmmakers with PhDs in WTF Studies teamed up to adapt David Mitchell’s renowned and widely regarded as unfilmable novel, the finished product unsurprisingly served a sizeable helping of what the what.
The movie contains a puzzling plot like some of the aforementioned movies, in the sense that it can be difficult to string together what happens when and to whom, but also in the sense that it’s separated into pieces that we’re left to put together by the end. There are storylines taking place in the past couple of centuries, in the present, and in the distant future, the last of which is as unrecognizable a world as such a future world would logically be.
The movie is polarizing even in the opinion of whether it is too obvious or too vexing, whether the connections between the stories is spelled out too plainly or not clearly enough to make it the least bit engaging. I found it to be intellectually puzzling and emotionally affecting. But especially in the scenes where Tom Hanks is speaking in dialect, I pretty much had a permanent single eyebrow raise going for the whole thing.
