Cloud Atlas

August 2012. I found myself in one of the worst places in the world: Houston Airport, Texas, awaiting a 13 hour flight that would take me back to Blighty after a month in the wilds of Ecuador. Alas, my only company for this arduous journey was Robinson Crusoe, and although the novel was great if you happen to get stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere, it offers little in the way of entertainment. After a stroll though an incredibly overpriced bookshop, I saw an article in a magazine about the Wachowski siblings (creators of The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer adapting a seemingly unfilmable, but brilliant book for the screen. Intrigued, I found said unfilmable book and decided to see if it was as good as everyone said it was. It may have been the most expensive book I've ever bought, damn you Americans! It was called Cloud Atlas.

October 2012. The Cloud Atlas film performs dreadfully in the USA. There are complaints about Jim Sturgess's "yellow make-up" when playing Hae Jo Chang, and much fun is made of the odd decision for characters to play multiple roles throughout the film. Empire ruminates that part of the reason for the film's failure is its strong message against exceptionalism and individualism, the foundations of "the land of the free". It seemed Cloud Atlas had hit upon an uncomfortable truth, as Sonmi-451 reveals, “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

February 2013. The British release of Cloud Atlas. After it's poor performance in the US, it had a limited release in the UK. The Newcastle Vue wasn't showing it! After finishing a 5000 word essay on the book (David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: Power in a Postmodern World, if my parents are to be believed it's practically indecipherable and a great causer of headaches) I headed off to the cinema. I don't think I've ever been as excited to watch a film in my life before. I'd seen the fantastic trailer after I'd finished the extraordinary book, and had been waiting for the movie for months. And so I settled down as the film's ominous opening began, a palpable air of tension reigned over the room. As the six narrative strands were introduced in the space of about 5 minutes, my cinematic companion noted "this is mad!". And he was quite correct.

So what is Cloud Atlas? Essentially, it's a crazy story about reincarnation across history into an imagined future. But I think it's one of the few films that really represents humanity, how we are and how we should be. Audiences may suffer from tonal whiplash: we switch from a hilarious story of a vanity publisher (the fantastic Jim Broadbent) trapped in a care home (including an episode involving a cat which is every male's nightmare ) to the futuristic world of Neo Soul where old clones are butchered, and the cheap protein is used to sustain younger clones (and you thought the horse meat scandal was bad).

But isn't that what life is? A lot of films are tonally consistent, Winter's Bone and The Road manage the extraordinary task of maintaining a tone of desolation and utter despair throughout the whole miserable affair, but our lives (which are not our own) are neither bloody miserable or ecstatically positive, they're both. Cloud Atlas manages to mix some of the funniest scenes I've seen on the big screen with two of the most heartbreaking deaths you're likely to see this year. This is no mean feat.

This tonal ambiguity (or rather, tonal pendulum swings), is sustained by the fantastic editing. Every scene has some link to the next, despite the differences in time and geography. The fast pace is maintained for nearly three hours, which will probably be the fastest three hours of your life. And what's more, although we have a huge cast of characters across hundreds of years, we still care about all of them, contrary to Charlie Brooker's mocking of the film on Weekly Wipe. We touch on just about every genre, and the romance works lot better on screen than it did in the book (although perhaps power relationships were better developed in the original text). The film's major advantage over the novel is the more explicit causal link between past, present and future (a Korean clone is inspired by a film of Cavendish's Ghastly Ordeal)

The idea of having actors playing multiple is inspired, although this is what a lot of viewers get hung up on and find a distraction (leading to Q Magazine referring to Cloud Atlas as Mr. Benn: The Movie). Characters who were torn apart in one life are granted happiness in another, and the eternal presence of evil in our lives is represented by Hugo Weaving in a variety of menacing roles (including that of an evil nurse!), sometimes he's defeated, and sometimes he is victorious, but only ever in the short term. Meanwhile, Tom Hank's characters make a transition across time from killer to hero, where he is eventually reunited after been blown to smithereens with the major heroine of the piece, Halle Berry. Doona Bae's Somni and Ben Wishaw's Frobisher present us with the conscience of the piece, occasionally wowing with philosophical statements that make you question how you live your life.

Many critics have called this film "a well delivered mess", but I think they are confusing the word mess with complexity. Cloud Atlas is like nothing I've ever seen before in its scope and bravery, which is why although it has a limited screening, it was almost a permanent fixture in any self respecting movie magazine in the weeks leading up to its release. The fact that Charlie Brooker (satirist who makes bold statements against satire?!?) chose to ridicule it is saying something, the week before he was deconstructing Skyfall ("Why couldn't Sam Mendes write an essay on why Bond is still relevant rather than killing lots of people?"). Even if you can't stand it, you have to look at Cloud Atlas with some form of grudging admiration. Despite this it has failed to win any major awards, even pipped to the post for Tykwer's beautiful music (on repeat now in my head) by Life of Pi at the Golden Globes. Do you remember any music in Life of Pi? I don't.

The only minor flaws in the film can be found in relation to the book. Two of the most beautiful passages have been omitted, which means the title now makes no sense whatsoever. But this is a rarity in literary adaptations. Rather than take the Wallflower approach and effectively make a carbon copy of the source text (albeit, a very good copy), the trio of scriptwriters/directors have kept some of Mitchell's best lines, but have also added their own, which are equally good if not better. Whole sections of the plot have been changed, but rather than being annoyed at the cuts and embellishments, it seems to make more sense this way as a film. The Wachowski-Tykwer partnership seems to have yielded something very special, a film that is totally independent from its source text.

Back to the cinema. Among my party there was a general air of confusion, most of which originated from someone (mentioning no names, Oliver Getley) finding much amusement in a dog being shot. Lots of fun was had with the credits, when the elaborate game of dress-up was finally exposed and the actors' different roles were revealed. At 11:30pm,  I felt that I could watch it all again. In fact, the following week I was plagued by a desire to get back on the roller coaster ride that was Cloud Atlas, so the next weekend I took my father to see it. I was afraid I wouldn't enjoy it as much after only a week, but I couldn't haven been more wrong. By the time Zachary disappeared with Meronym under starry skies, I had found my new favourite film, and in my father there was another convert to the Cloud Atlas cause.

Rating: (predictably) 10/10