In Mitchell’s novel, readers must draw their own connections between the tales, with only the recurring motif of a comet-shaped birthmark to suggest the continuity of a single soul across time. (By 2346, the middle class has been so ruthlessly eliminated that the world may as well be divided into cave-dwellers and astronauts.) Because the six segments naturally assume different styles, the division of labor among directors and their respective units complements rather than compromises the project’s overall success, with the makeup and visual effects departments each carrying off seemingly impossible feats of transformation. The riskiest and most essential of the threads - the one on which the entire tapestry depends - takes place in NeoSeoul, 2144, a socially stratified “Blade Runner”-like city in which genetically cloned fabricants serve their consumerist masters. Each of the stories involves some measure of romance, beginning in 1849, with American lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) separated from his beloved (Doona Bae) by seafaring adventures among the Pacific Islands, and extending to the year 2346, where a lowly goat-herder (Tom Hanks) falls for an emissary (Halle Berry) from the opposite end of the technological spectrum in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.īerry also stars in her own thread, playing Luisa Rey, a San Francisco reporter circa 1973 investigating the imminent threat of a nuclear reactor meltdown, receiving key assistance from scientist Rufus Sixsmith (James D’Arcy), who might just be the same man seen in the Cambridge-set 1936 chapter, a touching same-sex love story involving an aspiring musician ( Ben Whishaw) attempting to write what will become the film’s theme, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” a beautiful piece actually composed by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. Playing to their respective strengths, the Wachowskis tackle the earliest and two future-set segments, while Tykwer manages the three more contempo episodes, including a comedic one featuring Jim Broadbent as Timothy Cavendish, a borderline-senile book editor set in present-day London.īroadbent, like the rest of the multiculti cast, reappears in the other sections as well, fully reinventing himself as a briny sea captain and a world-famous composer, plus a couple other bit roles so cleverly disguised by makeup, auds might not recognize him on first viewing. Whereas the directors’ earlier films hook viewers from the opening scene, this one functions more like a symphony, laying out snatches of all six separate strands and gradually building toward grand movements in which these elements merge in different combinations. Like juggling Ginsu blades, the tricky feat is part stunt, part skill, but undeniably entertaining to witness as half a millennium of world history unfolds, much of it set in centuries still to come. ![]() ![]() Based on David Mitchell’s novel - more like six novels really, with each one executed in a different genre, then split and wrapped around the next in a nested, “The Saragossa Manuscript”-style construction - this daunting adaptation rejects the book’s innovative, but overly literary format in favor or a more cinematic approach, opting to tell all half-dozen tales at once.
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