Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas traverses genres, time periods, and storylines in a seemingly effortless manner that avoids establishing a straight-forward narrative without sacrificing clarity. The book has been described as a “puzzle box” of sorts, moving between dystopian sci-fi, a 19th Century diary, a modern novel, a thriller, and more. So when the Wachowski siblings and director Tom Tykwer decided to make a film version of the novel, they had their work cut out for them.
The Wachowskis’/Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas follows six stories, each of which take place in a different time period but nonetheless inform on each other. All of the narratives, from the odd sci-fi of the “Big Isle” sections to the 19th Century “Pacific Island” sequences tell a story of power, imprisonment, control, and corruption. The film attempts to intertwine each story via the use of the same actors playing multiple major and minor characters throughout, as well as references to characters seeing or reading elements that appear in other stories. While the novel divides the stories into two distinct parts for each, the film jumps around between key sections, allowing for a more cinematic building of tension. The intercutting juxtaposes key scenes in each story against similar key scenes in the others, convincingly drawing parallels as the tale proceeds.
The film of Cloud Atlas remarkably succeeds in its project, keeping the general concerns of the novel intact while simultaneously maintaining audience interest and keeping the shift in periods clear. The bending of gender and race among the various actors can produce a somewhat jarring effect, and some of the prosthetics used to accomplish are both distracting and, in places, borderline offensive. While the result is not a wholly successful film – it’s overlong in places, and perhaps a bit trite in some of the philosophy – it takes a very difficult novel and turns it into an interesting, provocative work, well worth the time.
