Even the critics who hated Cloud Atlas the most seemed to recognize that it was an ambitious project that the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer took on. For many, the mere fact of its ambition was praiseworthy. Attempting to create a visual incarnation of the 2004 David Mitchell novel surely was undertaken with a sense of inevitable impossibility, as it’s hard to imagine any other way of representing reincarnated souls that would not require lines upon lines of exposition or visual tricks even cheaper than using heavily made-up actors.
This movie brought up all sorts of questions for me about adaptation. In many ways, the entire pursuit is impossible, because for many people anything short of their perception of the book presented on screen will be disappointing. It’s hard to appreciate someone else’s vision of a novel becoming the dominant one when reading is such a personal endeavor. I get this way with books I love being made into movies, or often with remakes of past movies. But part of me thinks this is missing the point. All adapted works do is present another version of the same story, but that doesn’t really do any harm to the original story. I don’t know of any song covers that have made me no longer appreciate the original version of a song; in fact, bad covers tend to make me appreciate the song, and the songwriter, even more. So even if Cloud Atlas didn’t work for everyone like it did for me, I’m confused by the resentment it has generated. But it’s understandably an emotional issue. That’s not meant to be as dismissive as it sounds.
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