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Movie of the Week: Cloud Atlas
Mar. 1st, 2013 01:37 pmWow, what can I say about this film? I sat riveted, but I'm still not entirely sure what it was about or whether I can explain it. All I can say is that it seemed to make sense at the time. It's six stories set between the 1850s and the far, far future linked thematically and also by reincarnated souls. Themes include freedom/imprisonment, greed/acquisition and love/connections and these are echoes throughout the six stories with a handful of core actors playing different roles in each period, sometimes changing gender or race, sometimes good, sometimes evil.
It starts at the end and cycles through non-consecutive bits from each story segment in seemingly random order. Theres: a sick lawyer on a perilous sea journey to new Zealand in the 1850s; a disinherited young composer, his college lover and an aging but celebrated composer in 1920s Belgium; an investigative reporter embroiled in a nuclear conspiracy in Reagan's America (in which the composer's lover, now an older scientist, reappears); a (more or less) present day publisher in debt to loan sharks who is committed to a gruesome old folks home by his unsympathetic brother; a genetically modified fabricant in future Korea gaining sentience and fighting for freedom and Zachry a post-apocalyptic Pacific islander at odds with both the technological Prescients and the cannibalistic Kona.
The same actors play multiple parts resulting in massive kudos to the makeup department (surely an Oscar next year) as well as to the actors themselves. They convincingly changed Korean acress Doona Bae into a freckle-faced American redhead and Hugh Grant into both a heavyset bruiser and the near unrecognisable cannibalistic Kona tribesman. Some actors were so submerged in their parts that they were invisible beneath the role and face-spotting became part of the enjoyment. Tom Hanks was completely recognisable as Zachry and as scientist Isaac Sachs in the nuclear cinspiracy sequence , but it took ages for me to twig that he was also the evil Dr Henry Goose from the 1850s segment and his brief cameos as a parsimonious hotel clerk and a boozy Irish author were totally brilliant. Hugo Weaving played six different characters, but his domineering Nurse Noakes in the publisher segment was a pure joy to behold. (A kind of Rosa Klebb in a nurse's outfit!).
Each segment had a different feel to it, whether historical, thriller, comedy, noir or sci-fi The publisher story provided light relief with Jim Broadbent's Timothy desperately and hilariously trying to escape from his incarceration. The post apocalyptic section was the most difficult to follow because they used degraded language which took a while to tune my ear to. (A bit like trying to listen to text-speak as filtered through a three year old's vocabulary and grasp of grammar.) But that was a small price to pay for this movie. The folks next to us didn't get it at all and thought it an incomprehensible load of twaddle, but H and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Highly recommended.
It starts at the end and cycles through non-consecutive bits from each story segment in seemingly random order. Theres: a sick lawyer on a perilous sea journey to new Zealand in the 1850s; a disinherited young composer, his college lover and an aging but celebrated composer in 1920s Belgium; an investigative reporter embroiled in a nuclear conspiracy in Reagan's America (in which the composer's lover, now an older scientist, reappears); a (more or less) present day publisher in debt to loan sharks who is committed to a gruesome old folks home by his unsympathetic brother; a genetically modified fabricant in future Korea gaining sentience and fighting for freedom and Zachry a post-apocalyptic Pacific islander at odds with both the technological Prescients and the cannibalistic Kona.
The same actors play multiple parts resulting in massive kudos to the makeup department (surely an Oscar next year) as well as to the actors themselves. They convincingly changed Korean acress Doona Bae into a freckle-faced American redhead and Hugh Grant into both a heavyset bruiser and the near unrecognisable cannibalistic Kona tribesman. Some actors were so submerged in their parts that they were invisible beneath the role and face-spotting became part of the enjoyment. Tom Hanks was completely recognisable as Zachry and as scientist Isaac Sachs in the nuclear cinspiracy sequence , but it took ages for me to twig that he was also the evil Dr Henry Goose from the 1850s segment and his brief cameos as a parsimonious hotel clerk and a boozy Irish author were totally brilliant. Hugo Weaving played six different characters, but his domineering Nurse Noakes in the publisher segment was a pure joy to behold. (A kind of Rosa Klebb in a nurse's outfit!).
Each segment had a different feel to it, whether historical, thriller, comedy, noir or sci-fi The publisher story provided light relief with Jim Broadbent's Timothy desperately and hilariously trying to escape from his incarceration. The post apocalyptic section was the most difficult to follow because they used degraded language which took a while to tune my ear to. (A bit like trying to listen to text-speak as filtered through a three year old's vocabulary and grasp of grammar.) But that was a small price to pay for this movie. The folks next to us didn't get it at all and thought it an incomprehensible load of twaddle, but H and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Highly recommended.
