Cloud Atlas

This was a loss. A bold and extremely imaginative, variable and deep book transplanted into a dynamic and agile network that does not raise questions, but answers didactically. In addition, the film helps itself with the hackneyed new age symmetries that we know intimately from The Fountain, but also from Mr. Nobody - if you do not know how to connect remote storylines, fateful love is the answer. In addition, the film adds to it the typical pathetism of all-encompassing mysticizing concepts such as Eternity, Infinity, Reincarnation, Destiny, and if the viewer does not happen to get it, one of the characters will literally repeat it 4 times. The result is a completely uninteresting and mechanical work for me, which fails even in moments that I considered "laid" - the 5th story of Sonmi in the book is a poignant picture of capitalist-fascist-totalitarian dystopia, in which rebellion is only a prefabricated part of the consumerist chain. That's terribly little. Compared to The Matrix trilogy, the virtuoso Speed Racer or Tykwer's "gender-deconstruction" Three, this is more of a Junk Atlas. (11/24/2012)

A meticulously composed symphony that theoretically contains everything and aims to intellectually reach anyone who pays attention to it. However, at the end of this three-hour shift, I wasn't dazzled, but rather unpleasantly disappointed. Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer spare no visually perfect directorial ideas, but due to the imbalance of the individual stories, it's almost wasteful. I would gladly have spent at least half of the film in that Neo Seoul because I subconsciously expect action-packed sci-fi from this creative duo. Unfortunately, the odyssey of retirees, sailor ramblings, or journalist paranoia mostly passed me by sadly, and even during the catharsis, I couldn't find a direct path to them. It is a disappointment all that much greater because I seriously believed in this team – only to find myself paying attention to the role, race, or gender in which the amazing Tom Hanks or maturing Halle Berry appear. (06/10/2013)

Cloud Atlas is definitely a stimulating film, but I’m not sure what the directors’ primary intention was. I most enjoyed seeing how the all-encompassing favouritism towards minorities is related to the conventions of individual genres. Melodrama from the artistic environment was ascribed to homosexual romance, the main protagonists of an originally white paranoid thriller are a black female reporter and her partner, who were seemingly pulled out of a blaxploitation action flick. None of the genres employed in the film is entirely “pure” – the comedy is permeated with an escape movie, the thriller makes room for black humour – as the filmmakers acknowledge their own post-modern framing of the book on which the film is based, i.e. a point of view that doesn’t belong to any of the characters. Cloud Atlas is fine in its analysis of post-modern genre deconstructions, but it fails on a more basic level. I found the flat characters to be uninteresting. Contemplating who was hidden behind the mask was more entertaining to me than the acting. The six worlds are equally artificial, intended only for conveying certain transpersonal ideas. They are worlds for the camera, without a life of their own. So that we don’t doubt that one of the levels plays out in the 1970s, almost every exterior shot includes a car typical of the era (e.g. a Ford Mustang). The film fails to grip the viewer or offer a concentrated emotional experience. Taken together, the actions set in different time-space continua do not form a powerful sequence; on the contrary, they get in each other’s way and make it impossible for individual scenes to resonate. If the intention was to make it difficult for viewers to deal with the fact that the stories are fragmented and in no way interconnected, what need is there for the constant creation of banal thematic and graphic (and, to a lesser extent, symbolic) parallels? At least the similarity of the stories shouldn’t be so obvious and constantly emphasised through the off-screen commentary by one of the many narrators. Insufficient use of the fact that most of the stories are told by someone, in the form of a diary, a letter or a book, from the position of an interrogated prisoner or a respectable elder, represents another promise that the film makes and yet fails to develop (we only hear the narrators’ voices; otherwise, they remain unseen and do not actively get involved in the narrative, nor are they ever interrupted as it unfolds). Whatever the artistic intention may have been, which is not made very clear at all by the commercial rendering of the whole project, Cloud Atlas seemed to me like constantly interrupted intercourse without a proper climax. In exchange for the attention that I invested, and which had nothing to fixate on in places, I expected a more valuable reward than a message along the lines of “we have to help each other”, which I found to be ridiculous coming from a film that wants to break down conventions. 70% (11/26/2012)

Though there is nothing revolutionary this time norupdating of filmic means of expression as in the case of The Matrix or Speed Racer, or an encounter with something infinitely fresh as in the case of Run Lola Run, that does not in any way diminish the credit due to the Wachowskis and Tykwer. Their first collaboration is one big “and yet it works” with respect to the evident belief of producers and studio representatives that the eponymous work on which it is based cannot be filmed and with respect to the wrongheaded assumption that the result would be some sort of intellectual dumka; and we can add the belief that a spectacular blockbuster cannot be shot in Europe. In the final result, the fact that, at its core, Cloud Atlas does nothing revolutionary, yet guides the viewer without difficulty through its seemingly complicated narrative, is a fascinating illustration of the narrative possibilities of the medium of film and its language. (12/16/2016)

It’s remarkable that the seams that connect the different stories in different time and space are so imperceptible that the film flows smoothly and the three hours are not even noticeable. Unfortunately, it results in something that has neither sufficient emotional nor cathartic effect. In other words, there is no profound experience, and by the end I felt a bit....empty. Anyway, I appreciate the courage to come up with something so non-commercial and non-subversive in this day and age, when A-film production resembles a controlled process to make money. (11/25/2012)