Cloud Atlas - 2 1/2 smiles

I saw “Cloud Atlas” twice: the first time to understand the various stories (there are six), the second time to make meaning of those stories. And at three hours in length, I don’t think your average moviegoer should have to spend that much time trying to understand a movie. Directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings (Lana and Andy), and based on a novel by David Mitchell, “Cloud Atlas” is unlike any other movie. It takes place in six different periods of history and one scene follows the next in no particular order. There is no apparent logic to the scene shifts, but one movement or gesture in one era will connect with a similar movement in another.  There is little or no link between stories, except the repetition of familiar faces and attempts to depict endless cycles of patterns of human behavior. The directors cast Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent, Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess in a variety of roles. Implicit in the casting is the notion that these are the same souls in different incarnations, but the directors do little with his concept. Instead, the directors seem to focus on freedom, romantic, creative, political, combating the forces of repression.

The most interesting narrative is the one that takes place in Neo-Seoul in the year 2144. An obedient ‘fabricant’ clone Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) rebels against her lowly station as waitress-slave and joins the rebellion led by handsome Hae-Joo Chang (Sturgess). This allows the Wachowskis (who also did Matrix) to play with familiar elements, like rocketing chases through holographic highways amid a post-‘Blade Runner’ city. And Bae is genuinely touching as the factory worker awakening to her own individuality. Unfortunately, we are told the message of “Cloud Atlas” over and over — ‘Our lives are not our own,’ Separation is an illusion,’ ‘What is an ocean but a multitude of drops’ — rather than shown. And the makeup doesn’t always work: Berry as a white-skinned Jewess in 2012 London, Sturgess as a Neo-Seoul Asian and Bae as a 19^th century American wife. “Cloud Atlas” is an ambitious movie, an interesting movie, a different movie. Worth three hours? Maybe. Worth six hours? Definitely not. 10/29/12