There is an interesting TV series these days, called The Touch
..which covers how we are all connected in ways we can?t imagine and while its nothing out of the ordinary it beautifully creates all the links to put across a coherent story at the end of 45 minutes. Cloud Atlas..is the exact opposite to that What Cloud Atlas delivers is a journey that transcends multiple lives across centuries and then keeps flitting back and forth between them enough to make your head spin. When you tell such a complex tale you need to help the audience connect the dots and follow the plot in wondrous fascination (read movies like Crash
and Inception
) but Cloud Atlas is merciless in that department. After spending an agonizing 164 minutes, you are still as clueless as ever and wondering what to connect with what. In fact, you would be forgiven to believe that if you took any 6 random lives and drew them up together like this you?ll probably see this much connect anyways The real hero of this terribly long tale is the, often ignored, make-up department. Most of the time your favourite activity while watching the movie is figuring out who amongst Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry and the others are you really watching right now. So marvelous is the make up and presentation, that it takes a while to realize that the punk writer you are watching is really Hanks or that the savage you see on screen now is really Hugh Grant under awesome make up and prosthetics. Two thumbs up for that
With such a stellar cast the performances are bound to be good and they are. The entire cast play their multiple complex roles to perfection, no exceptions. The music and background score which ideally should have played a more integral role given the context of the movie is beautiful but limited.
At the end of it all, Cloud Atlas may be a wonderful story penned by British author David Mitchell
(in all fairness, I haven?t read it yet). But the lack of connect and the rather ambitious attempt of telling too much of this tale all at once, makes this movie a rather tedious and unsatisfying watch. Other than the make-up, Cloud Atlas didn?t scale much heights for me..whether this journey is still worth your while is up to you
