Starring: Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Hugh Grant
Rating: 2? stars out of 5
Splashed across time and space ? from 18th century sailing vessels to a futuristic world labouring across the heavens ??Cloud Atlas?is an immensely ambitious thingamajig that doesn?t work as a movie, but is unparalleled in the anti-climax of its message. Science fiction often builds elaborate and imaginative structures to house rather ordinary thoughts, but the animating ethos of?Cloud Atlas?(?we are all connected?) holds a special place in the canon.
That?s not all there is to it, of course. For instance, there is a cannibalism subtext that has a similarly wide-ranging sensibility, and when a book publisher (Jim Broadbent, in one of three roles he has in the film) who has been imprisoned in a fascistic old folks? home, yells, ?Soylent Green is people,? you begin to appreciate the scope, not to mention the influences, of the project.
It?s based on a novel by David Mitchell that was regarded as unfilmable and for good reason, as it turns out. It has been brought to the screen by directors Tom Tykwer (the multi-narrative?Run Lola Run) and the Wachowski siblings (the multi-everything?The Matrix).
There?s that in it as well: the dystopian space-age mindscape, here represented by a futuristic (and derivative) Korea called Neo Seoul where female replicants are used as waitresses and sex toys until one of them is rescued by an underground fighter (Jim Sturgess) who?s a kind of lovestruck Neo, except with unpersuasive makeup designed to make him look vaguely Asian.
Hugo Weaving, the villainous Mr. Smith of?The Matrix?series, plays three roles, including a female nurse, and it seems more than coincidental that another key character is named Mr. Sixsmith, seeing as how there are six narratives here, although not six Smiths.
The stories share actors and themes and, in a couple of cases, birthmarks: a racing comet that marks and joins characters across the eons. Tom Hanks is tied for the busiest with six roles, most memorably a primitive goatherd of the post-apocalyptic future ? ?106 winters after the fall,? the only hint we get about what happened ? named Zachary who speaks in a barely understandable pidgin.
His character is helping Halle Berry, who also has six roles including a space-suited survivor of the future who helps Zachary evade marauding tribes of cannibals, among them Hugh Grant.
He, in turn, is mostly a villain in his half-dozen parts, but even as the evil head of an oil company in 1970s America ? where he?s being investigated by Berry?s roaming reporter ? he can?t resist the self-deprecating knee-bends that once defined his career as the go-to love interest in a series of charming if disposable rom-coms.
Cloud Atlas?is further proof that the more things change, the more they?re typecast.
The best of the stories feature Broadbent, first as a contemporary publisher whose star author (Hanks again) does a very bad thing to a critic ? something that involves a harsh review, a high balcony, and a precipitous fall ? and whose outrage at what happens to him is an ideal expression of the?Cloud Atlas?befuddlement.
Broadbent also appears as a 19th century composer who hires a young amanuensis named Adam (Ben Whishaw) to transcribe his music. Adam ends up writing the?Cloud Atlas?symphony, another of the threads that holds the pieces more or less together.
There are some lovely visual touches across the various universes ofCloud Atlas, but with so much going on, it stays stubbornly unstitched: the stories trip over rather than enrich one another, and just as you start getting interested in one of them ? will the Korean woman named Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) get away from the storm troopers in Seoul of the future? ? you?re pulled back (or forward) to another fraught tale of slavery and slaughter.
It?s a film that?s mostly defined by its sprawling vision: it?s overstuffed and overlong and it feels as if the producers kept throwing more money at it to make it better, as if it were a government health crisis. Yes, we?re all connected, but that doesn?t mean we all have to be played by Tom Hanks.
Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/10/26/movie-review-cloud-atlas/
st louis blues rueben randle mike trout ryan broyles jerel worthy alshon jeffery miami heat
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