Tom Hanks, marked out by a cornucopia of conks, variously assays that wicked ship’s doctor (stage one), a brute Irish gangster-turned-memoirist (stage four), a sullen landlord in ’30s Edinburgh (stage two), and a cowardly tribesman, mottled in tattoos, in a far-off scorched Earth, whose face greets us as the chronicle begins (stage six). The cast rises to the crazed multiplicity of it all with aplomb. Most daring of the directors’ narrative chicanery is to embody the concept of recurring souls (or a genetic strain) by having the same actors play different parts in different stories. Even at nigh on three hours, it never drags.
#CLOUD ATLAS MOVIE#
In an age of relentless safety, its cocktail of human foible and movie madness is intoxicating. There is little doubting the glorious ambition of the project, both as an epic tableau and in terms of its filmmaking engineering.
Yet, the cryptic layering of it all urges you to open your eyes, ears and dusty lobes to decipher what the Hydra-headed film might be getting at. You could opt to simply relax and see what comes of letting the waterfall of stories wash over you.
Fearful such a framework might make their adaption feel too much like a portmanteau movie (a set of short films housed under one roof), even if that is exactly how Inception works, the directors take a more cinematically conventional, if technically challenging, approach by crosscutting back and forth between time and place, story and story, guided by an underlying thematic and associative blueprint. Mitchell’s literary remix devised an ingenious Russian-doll structure, moving forward in time through the beginnings of the first five stories of his pyramidal saga, before the sixth, most temporally distant episode played in full, then reversing outwards, completing each story in turn to end exactly where it began. Here also was the chance for Wachowski, Wachowski and Tykwer (who sound as if they are as likely to file a tax return as direct a movie) to spread their creative wings and swoop from the benighted city-state of Neo-Seoul populated by slave clones (forms of slavery persist across storylines), back to a Joseph Conrad-flavoured, 19th century sea-faring tale adrift in the boundless Pacific (oceans and islands are significant), concerning a treacherous ship’s physician with a thing for collecting teeth (baring their own tales of former owners). And how he makes sense of his capacity for both great good and hideous evil by transforming them into stories and myths religions and science songs, novels and movies too. How mankind is cursed and blessed to repeat himself. Mitchell’s tapestry of six stories contends with the cycles of time, the eternal bust-up between fortune and predestination, and our lonely quest for higher meaning. As with most things that pique the interest of the philosopher-geek Wachowksi siblings - on this occasion enrolling compeer Tom Tykwer into their wizard schemes - David Mitchell’s time and tale-traversing novel presented another chance to dally over vaulting matters of life, the universe and everything.
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