If you haven't read the book, I guarantee, while you sit still on the theater seats, watching the screen dumbly, a moment in which you will scratch your head. The movie is a humongous orchestration of different themes and styles that are exhausting while only occasionally exhilarating. Notwithstanding this fact, The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer's Cloud Atlas, lengthy but compact in its three-hour run-time, is visually impressive and beautifully crafted to even fight the urge of slightest of dislike.
Indeed, a movie very much imposing if not too striking.
I'm a strong believer that people will either widen their eyes with amazement or gasp for air with everything that the movie sends out constantly. Tag me as one somewhere in the middle. While Atlas features many actors who play a lot of different roles, the movie's best performance come from Ben Whishaw (Skyfall) as a bisexual composer who strive to write the best symphony he could. Tom Hanks and Halle Berry are unquestioned talents, but for some reason, Whishaw out-staged the two. Jim Sturgees (21), seeming like one of the romance genre's favorites, plays a successful lawyer and notary man who is probably one of the earliest people against racism. His appearance, however, is eventually trimmed down, in a romance with a genetically modified clone (Doona Hae) set in a dystopian version of Seoul, Korea. Jim Broadbent (Arthur Christmas) adds the comic spice. He's very much watchable.
Based on the sprawling book by David Mitchell (find my book review here), the movie follows six loosely interconnected stories set in different eras and settings. In each story is a main character with a star birthmark - that's the connection. But little events in each story result to another that happens in the next, hence the promotional tagline Everything is connected making sense.
Cloud Atlas is nothing if not a bold and ambitious attempt in style. Depending on your sensibilities, the movie may appear to you as this unwieldy if not because too hefty epic or just a plain bloated mess. Regardless, one cannot deny how the movie is aggressively tackled, beautifully filmed and competently acted.
VERDICT: B+
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