Cloud Atlas (2012)

Sometimes, you really can be too smart for your own good. It's all well and good being an advanced nuclear physicist, but when you begin to be wanted by the government for disrupting the powers that be with your research, it would pay to lose a few IQ points, for example. While that scenario could pass for one of Cloud Atlas' own, it's moral rings true for it. Andy and Lana Wachowski (of The Matrix fame) walk the line between making a smart film and alienating its audience with talk of quantum physics and spiritual meaning, but come prepared with a willing mind and, preferably, a pen and paper and Cloud Atlas is as much an eye-opening, genius piece of philosophy as much as it is an intriguing movie. For those who just came from the Expendables viewing a few screens down, let me enlighten you. Cloud Atlas is the story of a group of souls, or quantum entangled particles, or actors in prosthetics, depending on your outlook, whose tale takes place across 6 different time periods in, generally, the same place. The easiest way to explain this is to take it as a movie about reincarnation, where each actor plays a 'soul', but in different sets and costumes, so they might play a revolutionary against the oppressive government in 2144, and then an investigator looking at a conspiracy in 1972 in the next scene. The beauty of the film is that each of the 6 stories are interconnected by both cameos of characters from other stories and the overall progression of the plot and themes. It's a tough one to explain, but once you get your head around it, it makes sense. To clarify, the 6 settings are *deep breath*: the Pacific Islands (1849), Cambridge (1936), San Francisco (1973), London (2012), Neo Seoul (2144) and a post-apocalyptic island 106 years after the fall of man. What this means is that the film never has a chance to grow stale, because the moment you might be sick of Ben Whishaw battling his creative differences with Jim Broadbent, you're whisked away to Tom Hanks in the jungle in full-on Cast Away mode. There's no rest where it stops to check you got all that just happened, it just assumes you caught that and pushes on to a female Hugo Weaving in make-up 1000 years prior. Sadly, this can pose a problem to some. Each story is seemingly disjoined from the next, so it's almost like seeing 6 different movies all trying to interrupt each other. It's here where my initial warning comes into play. You need to be pay attention at all times, so when Jim Sturgess floods a room full of CG robots, causing all manner of big budget mess, you can't sit back and enjoy it, because it's only a metaphor for Halle Berry feeling under pressure from her murder investigation in 1973. Cloud Atlas never lets up the ties to itself and an unprepared mind will find themselves lost. However, for those looking for something a little different and intelligent, Cloud Atlas delivers it in spades. My previous comment that these people are reincarnations of each other is only one possibility of what the movie is about. Like any great work of fiction, it is what you make it. If you are able to look past the setting and style of each story and the cuts between them, you'll see that they all form one coherent plot that doesn't feel the need to explain itself to those not intelligent enough to do so. If you can't think while watching a movie, you should probably just find Schwazenegger's Commando on Netfilx or something. It's easy to get forget sometimes that you're only watching a movie, but when you remember your place in the universe, you'll see Cloud Atlas is remarkably well made besides the plot too. Unprecedented make-up work allows actors to play characters 50 years older than themselves, and one or two even pull off trans-gender roles. Each performance is held up by great writing and while one or two actors never leave their comfort zone (Hugo Weaving is just Agent Smith 6 times), the greats like Hanks show how diverse they can really be. It also, amusingly, makes for a great game of actor-spotting. Each scenario is a Where's Wally set-up, each with a Ben Whishaw, Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent and many more to find. Post-apocalyptic Broadbent is a tough one and I'm still scratching my head over James D'Arcy on the Pacific Ocean. Cloud Atlas is like an Inception for English Literature students. It's tough to follow, but hides some great amount of thought and truly deep themes that can't go unstudied. A tough sell to the action junkies, but to the Shakespeare fan club, it's a gold mine of interpretations and philosophies. So not quite too smart for it's own good, but it's only a hop, skip and a jump from being part of a Mensa exam. Breathtaking, but only if you make it so.